Brooklyn Indie Party at Greenlight!

1. Friends of Independent Press-ers Chris, Elena, and Jenny. 2. A crew of well-dressed Pratt students (is there any other kind?): Writers Catherine Douglas, Joe Sutton, & Kathering Martina, art history major Sofia Kofodimos, painter Rebecca Warlick.

Last night’s Brooklyn Indie Party was fittingly held at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Green, a beacon for all things local and literary. The party featured representatives from (deep breath here): A Public Space, Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, Armchair/Shotgun, Black Balloon, BOMB Magazine, (our very own) Electric Literature, Ig Publishing, Litmus Press, Melville House, powerhouse Books, Stonecutter, Tin House, Ugly Duckling Presse, Umbrage Editions and Vulgar Marsala.

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Getting HOT at 3rd Ward with Canteen Magazine

1. Tao Lin and beef jerky (not pictured). 2. The panel discussing the state of celebrity [L to R: Garth Risk Hallberg, Tao Lin, Fiona Maazel, Erin Hosier, & Christopher Koulouris.]

“Are you two the ones in these photos?” I was greeted by Lee Bob Black, pointing to a photograph borrowing from American Gothic. Black, who runs a literary program in Harlem and teaches 12-year-olds how to write poems (you can see them here), withdrew his question after my friend Sara and I stepped further into the room (I swear it was the lighting).

We were here for the release of Canteen Magazine’s Hot Authors issue, which combines the “literary with the lascivious, the genius with the glam,” as well as a panel discussion on the topic of “Marketing Literature in the Age of Gawker.” I was bit anxious about Gawker having achieved its own “age,” but was interested in the revolving question of the night: Is there a glamour deficit in literature?

From P-Town: Mixtapes on the Make

1. Erik Bader, Literary Mixtape No. 5 host & co-organizer, will be your friend on Facebook. 2. Sarah Mirk, two conversations, and one guy leaving the bar.

Around the corner from Voodoo Donuts, Erik Bader hosted his fifth Literary Mixtape reading at Valentine’s with Paul Collins, NPR’s literary detective on Weekend Edition; Sarah Mirk, Portland Mercury Journalist; and Pauls Toutonghi, English Professor at Lewis & Clark College and novelist. Co-organizer Matthew Korfhage usually hosts the event, but he was fixing a wind turbine somewhere where wind turbines are found and repaired.

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Bookend Kick-Off! EL & Tin House @ powerHouse

1. Literary Agent Renee Zuckerbrot, Tin House editor Rob Spillman, & Greg Villepique, who is the managing editor at Rodale. Literary rockstar status aside, Spillman did a great job helping us with all the boring tasks of setting up, which involved dumping tons of ice and beer into huge trash cans. Who knew that starting a lit mag would later involve such work? 2. Alison Espach, who wrote The Adults, & Lincoln Michel, who co-founded Gigantic and is the books editor for The Faster Times.

Last night, Electric Literature, Tin House, and powerHouse joined forces to celebrate the launch of this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Tin House, one of our favorite literary magazines and our co-hosts for the evening, was also celebrating the debut of their new issue, “The Ecstatic.” And the occasion also marked the official release of Electric Literature No. 6, featuring stories by Nathan Englander, Mary Otis, Steve Edwards, Marc Basch, and Matt Sumell. Our new, non-nude cover means that we’ll no longer have a naked man on our home page — maybe Google will finally downgrade us from a pornographic website to one that is merely PG-13 (with a clown fetish). To ring these in there were readings by both EL & Tin House contributors, live music by local band Backwords, and free beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery.

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REVIEW: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach


The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
Little, Brown
512 pages/$25.99

 

In the middle of Chad Harbach’s debut novel, a character wonders why anybody should care about Henry Skrimshander, “a silly kid with a silly problem” and the character around which the book’s plot revolves. Henry’s problem is silly. A college shortstop who’s hustled and sweated himself into a legitimate draft prospect, he finds himself incapable of consistently tossing a baseball to first base after his throwing error severely injured his bench-riding roommate. Had the game not been called on account of player hospitalization, the misfire would have gone into the annals and officially ended Henry’s record-tying streak of errorless innings.

The Art of Fielding‘s 500 pages are focused on life at Wisconsin liberal arts college, seen largely through the eyes and minds of two ballplayers, the institution’s president, and his daughter. While Henry is the centerpiece, this ensemble gives the book breadth and breath. The narrative unfolds in the third-person, but Harbach tucks the reader comfortably inside one of those four characters’ heads for a chapter at a time. Because it’s superbly written, a reader does care about Henry Skrimshander and his problems, and the same is true for each of Harbach’s characters and each of their problems, silly or not.

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Something’s Funny at Franklin Park

1. Emma Straub with Michael Fusco, who is a devoted husband (to Straub), graphic designer (he designed the cover of Straub’s book), and tennis fan (these are their game faces!). 2. Crowded house! Lit fans sat on the ground almost all the way up to the podium.

Last night began, for me, an intense week of LITERATURE. The Brooklyn Book Festival is this weekend, a.k.a. the lit world’s answer to Fashion Week. And what better way to start this whirlwind of words than at Franklin Park Reading Series, with the theme this month being “Funny People.” I mean, who doesn’t like to laugh? Well, I mean, besides goths.

Apparently a lot of people agreed with me, or maybe it’s just people who are 25 to 35-years-old and living in Brooklyn are obsessed with Michael Showalter. Either way, Franklin Park was packed last night. And I mean packed. Penina Roth, the series’ curator and host, told us that the bar was more crowded than at the DJ events on Fridays and Saturdays. Only in Brooklyn.

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Finding the Future

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

 

I arrived at the Centennial Exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen  A. Schwarzman building, fully expecting to get lost in the past.  But there, above the iconic stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, I was surprised to see a large sign inviting me inside to “Find the Future”.

Surely the slogan was meant to be inspiring, but its stark font filled me with dread.  The future was what kept rushing at me through my Twitter feed:  the threat of more hurricanes, another election season, the development of an HBO adaptation of The Corrections.  I wanted to walk around in a beautiful Beaux-Arts building and examine the belongings of writers long-dead.  I wanted to forget what century it even was.

The exhibit did not disappoint.  Inside I found a massive room filled with artifacts, literary, historical, and otherwise:  Columbus’s letters, Audubon’s “Birds of America”, and Kepler’s first model of the solar system.  But then I noticed a gleaming white MacBook sitting under glass in the center of the room, quietly displaying the New York Times homepage.  Was this what they’d meant by “Find the Future”?  Beside the laptop sat two small lumps of clay, etched in cuneiforms that were over 5,000 years old.  The earliest known human writing looked sad and insignificant when placed next to the sleek, glowing machine.

A nearby sign explained that “as the Internet makes information increasingly easy to obtain, and more experiences become virtual, direct encounters with the Library’s books, manuscripts, prints, photographs and objects reveal the collections as an indispensible public resource.”  A teenaged boy came up and pressed his face against the glass, staring longingly at the laptop.  He did not seem to want virtual, direct encounters.  It looked like he wanted to check his email.

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From P-Town: Marsha, Marsha, Marsha

1. Waiting for LDM to start. 2. Kristin “Shhh!”; Ali “Ruckous”; Vinnie “Death Fight”; and Jeremy, who hopes this is the literary referential equivalent to a rap battle so he can watch the saliva fly.

Opium Magazine’s second Literary Death Match in Portland was at times a cruel reminder that Marsha is out there to make you feel second best. No one wants to be Jan Brady, especially not in Portland. Fortunately, competitive readings like LDM offer some great feedback for writers who want to be interesting off the page.

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Eat Your Words, Not the Food

1. Lots of hungry New Yorker’s crawled over. 2. Theresa and Jesse, coupling out.

As I looked through the twenty choices for venues and readings at the fourth annual NYC Lit Crawl on Saturday, the one that caught my eye was No. 3, “Eat Your Words,” which took place at Jimmy’s No. 43. The description put me in Eat, Pray, Love mood as it drew me to Lauren Shockey, Joshua Bernstein, and Giulia Melucci “dishing about brews, ex-boyfriends and spaghetti,” all three of which I consume in great quantity.

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September 11 Stories

Whether you were in high school in Missouri or headed to work in Manhattan, chances are you remember exactly where you stood ten years ago on September 11. While some were directly affected by the events of 9/11 and others watched it on the news, there is no denying that the day changed everything: our national identity, our lives, and our fiction.

The Economist‘s “How 9/11 Changed Fiction,” an essay that also functions as a 9/11 reading list, looks at the ways those events changed and challenged how we write. Perhaps it’s too soon to write about a tragedy that is still looming, perhaps it’s still too tangible for fiction, too difficult for characters to emerge from the shadows of the towers. R. B. writes, “9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it’s a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.”

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