Rude Awakenings

1. Lee Papa on Reagan’s cold, dead hands. 2. Sady Doyle on gender studies as applied to childhood pretend-play.


It seemed pretty apt of Lee Papa to open a reading last night with a story entitled “I Touched Ronald Reagan and I Have the Scars to Prove It” in the dead, dead heat of Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. Imagine a room full of book nerds happily packed into the back of the bookshop, sipping their beers that threatened to slip out of their hands due to bottle sweat, while listening to stories by the likes of Lee Papa, David Rees,  Sady Doyle, Jill Filipovic, and Rachel Sklar on the origins of their liberalism. Quite awesome, actually.

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The Milan Review of Ghosts Launch Party

1. The stadium seating crowd, with FSG staffers Dan and Mark enjoying the free Asahi in the middle row. 2. Tim Small shows off his creation.

The powerHouse Arena is no Standard Hotel rooftop, but it was quite the right venue for last night’s intimate launch party for The Milan Review, created and imported by Tim Small and Riccardo Trotta, the editor and production manager, respectively, of VICE Magazine’s Italian operation.  The inaugural edition is The Milan Review of Ghosts, and each biannual issue will be dedicated to the review of another worldly or otherworldly thing.  It’s unclear if the format will change too, but I hope it doesn’t because the Review’s first run built to withstand abuse of a book toted deep within a New York handbag: hardbound, and a lovely size and weight.

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Literary Death Match – BEA Edition

1. Judges gonna judge: Michael Showalter, Dave Hill, & Daniel Nayeri. Showalter judged Performance, Nayeri judged Literary Merit, and I have no idea what Hill judged but it must have been a strangely and/or vaguely-named category. 2. CROWD SHOTS! break time.

I was really excited to go to Literary Death Match last night. I’ve wanted to go since I began writing for Dish! but have always had class on Wednesdays. But now I’m done with school, and my Wednesday nights are free, free, freeeeee!

I was particularly excited to go to this Death Match because I was familiar with judges Dave Hill & Michael Showalter, I met reader Mira Ptacin at Franklin Park and she’s super rad, and I think that reader Jenny Slate’s Marcell the Shell video is pretty much the cutest thing ever.

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Knopf at powerHouse

1. Monika Woods, is a writer. She’s halfway through Swamplandia!, and a fan. Nick Borelli is an artist and a Ben Marcus enthusiast. 

2. Ellie Lord is a big reader. Mallory Rice edits the books page for Nylon magazine.


At 8 p.m. on Tuesday I was at the powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, killing time before the Knopf author showcase. I stood with my friend by the bar. “Look who’s in front of you,” she whispered. I looked right up into Jim Shepard’s mustache. “And behind you.” There, tiny, lovely, was Sloane Crosley.

We were apparently surrounded by literary greatness. Literary greatness apparently surrounds the bar.

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Getting a Book into the Main Branch

1. VIP pass: And then there is the strangeness of presenting our capacity to make history in superheroic language. 2. Kenny Mikey, storyologist. 3. The staircases in the stacks were ornate. After I took this shot, I was hurried along.

I spent Friday night at the New York Public Library’s main branch with 499 other people (plus an uncounted slew of librarians, volunteers, security guards, and caterers) to take part in Find the Future, a game of sorts that was thrown to celebrate the library’s hundredth birthday. The point of it was to collectively make history by writing a book, which, we were told, was the first of its kind—there were a lot of things being celebrated for being firsts all night. But the book is going to be housed in the stacks at Bryant Park for as long as New York City is standing. (Barring the zombie apocalypse, the city will be standing a good long time, which means you’ll be able to go to the library and look me up for a good long while too. Color me pink, and color everyone else there the same: getting our names in the catalog seemed to be a major draw.)
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REVIEW: Orientation by Daniel Orozco

Orientation

by Daniel Orozco

Faber & Faber

176 pp/$23

“Orientation” by Daniel Orozco is a short story so good it was published and anthologized a full decade before headlining its author’s debut collection.

But I had never heard of the story, last year, when my creative writing class and I decided to read it aloud together. There was no way I could’ve known how good it would be—the kind of good that makes you giddy, the kind of good that reminds you what fiction is capable of in the hands of an author who’s tuned to the crackpot voices in his head but is also able to fine-tune and tame those voices—the kind of author, who, like you, detects the teeming schizo wavelengths humming under every civilized effort to control ourselves, to behave, to be sensible.

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Gigantic Party

1. Babycastle’s arcade installation in the front room. 2. Another shot of the arcade! 3. Ann DeWitt, one of the editors of Gigantic, & Jerome Jakubiec, Gigantic’s photographer for the evening. Please note DeWitt’s awesome fringe dress.

Last night, the second-coolest lit mag in New York [ ; ) ], Gigantic, had a party to celebrate the release of their third issue. And when I say “party,” I don’t mean a few glasses of wine and some people standing around a bookstore. Instead, this was held in a warehouse-type deal at 285 Kent in North Williamsburg. There were bands, there was booze, there were DJs, there were even video games and a little bit of reading.

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Sloane Crosley @ BookCourt

1. Daniel Hind, Sloane’s agent’s assistant at WME and fan. 2. Sloane Crosley signing books.  Colson Whitehead has called Crosley, “Hilarious and affecting and only occasionally scatological.”


I like Sloane Crosley.  She’s funny, she’s smart, and her writing effortlessly glides from revelations of bitter disappointment to in-depth discussions of My Little Ponies, Girl Talk, and yes, turds (I couldn’t resist).  She does this unapologetically.  As a fellow child of the Eighties, I can appreciate how Crosley shines a light on the totems of our youth (excepting the turd, which I’m fairly certain is a totem of everyone’s youth regardless of decade).

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REVIEW: Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman

Someday This Will Be Funny

Lynne Tillman

Red Lemonade

176 pp/$14.95

As with most of the things Lynne Tillman creates, even the title of her new collection, Someday This Will Be Funny, sustains (and even encourages) multiple readings. These are, of course, the words we grimly promise to ourselves in the face of embarrassment, loss and despair—feelings that Tillman’s characters have in spades—in the hope that, one day, our pain will be diminished. But underneath this gloss lurks a deeper recognition of the almost farcical state of the American union of the last ten years. For Someday This Will Be Funny is, in a peculiar sense, a testament to the decade we’ve just exited, a collection undeniably infused with the zeitgeist of an America still reeling from the Bush administration. Tillman’s singular voice and mind induces a certain kind of historical vertigo—if not nostalgic claustrophobia—as it palpably resurrects the malaise of the past decade.

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