Debutante Ball

1. Five debutantes and eligible bachelors all in a row. 2. Dani Shapiro accepts the Mentorship Award.

One afternoon tea after Kate Middleton became the Duchess of Cambridge, five writers put on their finest digs to be announced to the literary world as the bright young stars they are. The event was One Story’s Literary Debutante Ball, billed on its program as “A Celebration of Emerging Writers.” Really, it was a fancy, boozy party and the writers—judging by the rowdy applause—are more ‘emerged’ than ‘emerging.’ The venue was the Invisible Dog Art Center in Boerum Hill, a restored warehouse with one 8,000-pound capacity freight elevator that moved guests from the ground floor to the party upstairs.

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anderbo at KGB

1. Aziz Friedrich’s word about Foreigners. 2. Florin, in the audience, is doing PhD in antrophology and came to listen to some good fiction.

A wire for literary birds. A sea for fiction mermaids. A glass of freshly made lemonade to a thirsty poet-kid. That’s what KGB Bar is to literary fans, writers, poets, journalists and other creatures.

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How I Learned

1. Elissa Bassist and Sam Lipsyte, whose stories included lots of hair, and hair down there. 2. The night’s hostess, Blaise Allysen Kearsley, worked John Hughes trivia into the night. Someone in the crowd had just correctly answered the question, “Who played Long Duk Dong?”


If you have never had the pleasure of a visit to the Happy Ending, you should know this: the entrance looks very much like a sleazy massage parlor. Walk into that badly-marked storefront, and you will find a set of strangely translucent double doors, monogrammed towels in a glass case and a welcoming pile of free condoms nestled in a decorative bowl.

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PEN Opening Night

1. In her poems, Nicaraguan poet Giaconda Belli drinks wine, curls up with books and floats on water, staring at flocks of birds. 2. Molly Crabapple, a painter and founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, will spend the week working on an installation at The Standard as part of the PEN festival.


When Malcolm Gladwell took the stage Monday night for the opening of the PEN World Voices Festival, he squinted out at the crowd. “I feel like I’m on a Sesame Street segment,” he said. “One of these things is not like the other.”

Gladwell was the only non-fiction writer among the dozen or presenters at The Lighthouse on Chelsea Piers. They read from poems, novels and stories in English, Hebrew, Spanish and Romanian. The Hudson sparked through the plate-glass windows. It was the perfect setting for the night’s theme—water.

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REVIEW: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

The Sisters Brothers

by Patrick DeWitt

Ecco

336 pp/$24.99

There were moments while reading Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers when I was able to correctly predict what was going to happen next, but they were few and far between. The book almost seems to be making a game of setting up and subverting expectations.

One of the most enjoyable ways it does this is with the narrator’s voice. Our guide through the novel is Eli Sisters, the younger and gentler of the titular siblings. They are a brother act of assassins in the wild west of 1851. Eli relates what he sees in spare, unadorned prose with darkly funny reflections on human nature that stop admirably short of heavy-handedness. He tells his story rather like a boy writes a letter home from summer camp. You might expect that such a style would get tiresome or trite after a couple hundred pages, but not so. The narrative remains engaging despite, or because of, the straightforward description.

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Contents and Discontents

1. Kate Adler and Alison Pitt aren’t writers but they came because it sure beat going to a bar. 2. Logan Kinney and Steve Kinney – teachers, guitarists, fans of Mike Doughty, and picturesque wine drinkers even though my flash didn’t help things.


“Welcome to the Cabinet of Wonders…I present its contents…and discontents.”

So began John Wesley Harding last night at City Winery.  The event was his self-titled Cabinet of Wonders show, which this time around featured Allison Moorer, Mike Doughty, Tanya Donelly, Eugene Mirman, Rick Moody, Mary Gaitskill and JWH himself.  A stellar line-up to be sure, and as I sipped my fancy-schmancy house-made Gewürztraminer, I felt there were worse anti-dotes to a rough week in cubicle world.

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3 Min Food

1. The glowy red den of Matchless’s stage. 2. Nicole, a teacher, and Chichi Wang, who writes for Serious Eats, and read us the intro from her new book (which is almost finished! She’s on the last chapter).


Greenpoint’s Matchless Bar was the scene for anyone with ADD and/or an abbreviated attention span’s favorite reading series, Vol. 1’s “Greatest Three-Minute” stories. This series features fifteen different writers, reading for – yes – three minutes on a specific topic. Last night’s topic was food, which made sense considering that yesterday was 4/20 and also the middle of Passover. As people migrated into the back room from the bar (with impossibly slow bartender), the room went from crowded to packed.

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Great Literary Awakening

I’ve had more than one Great Literary Awakening, but perhaps the one that is easiest to define took place about ten years ago. I had just formally dropped out of high school, was about to take the test to get my GED. I spent the days working at my first full-time job, 40 hours a week at the local Barnes & Noble. The nights—I spent those drinking pink wine and yellow beer in dirt lots, and sometimes in the swimming pools of the nearby apartment complexes that had less-than-stellar security systems.

As an employee of B&N, I received a hefty employee discount. Additionally, I was allowed to check out any hardcover as though it were a library book, and also keep any mass-market paperback that had been stripped. But this was not enough for me. Like most of my coworkers, I decided that my compensation for getting paid just over minimum wage to deal with assholes who wanted Thomas Kinkaid picture books and copies of Who Moved My Cheese was to steal anything I wanted. And so I stole. Hundreds of books, anything that sounded the least bit interesting or appealing. Aleister Crowley’s biography. Hardcover copies of the latest Chick Lit. Tarot decks, CDs, dozens of Moleskin notebooks, brightly colored backpacks from the children’s section. And novels, more novels than I could ever hope to finish.

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Fashionably Late

1. Marie Davis, fashion journalist at Drapers, and Rob Nowill of Oki-ni.  Absolutely Fabulous. 2. Fabiola Arias, wearing one of her own designs and who designed the attire of co-chair Michelle Klein….and Daniel Feld, who snuck in.

CAPITALE was the scene of last night’s BOMB gala, a party so hot I almost didn’t get in.  Luckily, the fates (and Paul Morris) were on my side and I eeked out an invite at the last moment.   But I was running late and, rushing from my day job, and I had to change into cocktail duds in the backseat of my car on Orchard Street.   Then I teetered over to Bowery and Grand and suddenly, I found myself surrounded by the beautiful people (see picture 1).  You’d be hard pressed to find a rumpled writer in the bunch and in fact, art dealer Derek Storm had informed my husband as he waited for me to arrive, we had just missed Kim Cattrall.

Perhaps, then, I was the rumpled writer.

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of BOMB.  The quarterly magazine was conceived in the early Eighties when visual artists, writers, and filmmakers who were then living in downtown Manhattan decided to take the discussions they were having on street corners, dinner parties, and bars and put them to page.  In that spirit, the crowd was a nice soup of writers, artists, actors, musicians, and to make the party uber-fabulous, Fashion People.

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Tell us about you and David Foster Wallace

If you’re like me, you’ve ignored several sets of responsibilities this week to read The Pale King [Editors, publicists, English 1010 students, family, ophthalmologist, and others: if I haven't gotten back to you, I promise to return to being a responsible person next week].

We want to know what it’s like to be you and encounter this new book, or to be you when you first discovered David Foster Wallace.

We’re inviting readers, authors, critics, professors, and fans of all kinds to record responses to David Foster Wallace on our digital storytelling platform, Broadcastr. Maybe you could read a favorite passage, or tell a story about finding This is Water, or share a your thoughts on the influence DFW has had on writers everywhere, “I first discovered David Foster Wallace when…”, or “What I like about Consider the Lobster is…” or anything at all.

An archivist at the Ransom Center, which acquired the Wallace archives in 2009, tells her story here.

Record yours and tag it “PaleKing.” We’ll share the mess of them here and everywhere in the next few weeks.

–Anna, The Outlet’s editor.

PS. Are you near UT-Texas? Tonight, 4/15, readings to celebrate release of The Pale King at the Ransom Center (readers include EL contributor Kevin Brockmeier, Doug Dorst, Amelia Gray and Jake Silverstein). If you’re not in Austin, you can watch the live Web cast here.