Young Lions Fiction Award 2012 — Three Roars for Karen Russell!

1. The Celeste Bartos Forum, shortly before the ceremony. 2. Crosley, Lerner, Cole, Marx, Hale, & Crudup. You can tell I’m a fake journalist/photographer who was sneaking into this shot, because they’re all looking at the real journalist with the big flash, and not at me with my point-and-shoot. 

 

In 2001, the Young Lions Fiction Award was founded by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland as a way to encourage and celebrate the work of a young author (“young,” in this case, is defined as under 35). This year, the nominees included Teju Cole (Open City), Benjamin Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Karen Russell (Swamplandia!), and Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones). The awards ceremony was hosted by actor Billy Crudup (from Jesus’ Son, omgz!) at the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street on Monday night.

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Night of Indie — Small Press and Lit Mag Night at Franklin Park Reading Series

1. Joseph Riippi, author of A Cloth House, with Abigail Rose Welhouse, a poet and City College MFA candidate, a water sign, and a book publicist at Scott Manning & Associates. 2. Host and Curator Penina Roth opening up the night, with the elusive Penelope from Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt accidentally caught by my camera.
 
A gloomy and muggy NYC evening holds no reading junkie back. This month, Franklin Park Reading Series went big, besides the $4 pint specials and fantastic lineup. To celebrate small presses and literary magazines, subscriptions, books, and a radical t-shirt were raffled. Two lucky lit peeps went home with one-year subscriptions to The Paris Review and The Coffin Factory, each of the reading authors’ books found themselves new homes, and the focus of my jealousy: someone now owns a Paris Review t-shirt with the OG logo from the ’60s, printed on what looked like those love 50/50 cotton-poly blend tees. Luckily, all of us got to hear Daniel Long (The Fiddleback), Jac Jemc (My Only Wife), Miles Klee (Ivyland), Robert Lopez (Asunder), and Elissa Schappell (Co-Founder of Tin House and author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls) for free. Party.

The Gentrification of the Mind: A Talk with Sarah Schulman at St. Mark’s Bookshop

1. Schulman telling us how very different the village was then from how it is now. 2. The crowd listening, rapt.

I came for the inspiration and stayed for the revelations. Sound like church? Yes indeed! An East Village kind of church: the St. Mark’s Bookshop.

The place was just as I remembered it from my childhood: full of fascinating books about REAL people, new avant-garde magazines, and the pervasive sense of safety. The safety, the coziness of St. Mark’s, is provided by its championing of the underground, leftist, bohemian village world of old—the last vestiges of which are disappearing day by day.

“A 7-Eleven has opened up on St. Marks Place,” said Sarah Schulman, opening up her talk. “That is what we are here to talk about today.”

It felt just like an organizing meeting, and indeed– Sarah Schulman’s new book walks hand-in-hand with activism. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination brings to light the effects of one of New York’s deliberately ignored tragedies: the AIDS crisis.

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INTERVIEW: Mike Doughty, Author of The Book of Drugs

Mike Doughty is known to a lot of people as a lot of things: The leader of Soul Coughing, a New York City staple, a poet, a sober drug addict, a successful singer-songwriter. Now, he’s also a memoirist – his Book of Drugs came out earlier this year, and it’s a pretty damn good read. Doughty tells the story of Soul Coughing, with all the gristly details of their break-up included, and then goes on to write about his subsequent solo career. And, of course, there’s a lot of drugs involved.

But it’s more than a rock memoir, or an addiction memoir. Throughout, Doughty’s wry, honest writing seeks to find some kind of clarity, some kind of truth. The result is a fun and funny  – but brutal – trip in and around life, the world, and the music industry.

I met up with Doughty a few weeks ago at House of Small Wonder in Williamsburg to talk to him about his process, identity, spirituality, medication, and — duh — drugs.

Julia Jackson: When did it become clear to you that you needed to write a book?

Mike Doughty: It never did. I would always sort of talk about it, until somebody was like, “Here’s money,” and then my bluff was actually called, and I had to write a book. I get asked that a lot and I just don’t know. [Laughs.] If I may speak cornily, then grace put me in the book path, all of a sudden.

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BLOODBATH!!! at Parlor NY for Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading Launch Party

Last night, we celebrated the launch of our most recent baby, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, at Parlor New York in SoHo. In case you’re unaware, Recommended Reading is free, digital content that will come to subscribers weekly. For each week of the month, a new story is selected: the first, by our staff (the first issue features a new story by Ben Marcus); the second, by an indie press like Akashic or New Directions; the third, by an established writer such as Jim Shepard; and the fourth, will come from a literary magazine’s — such as One Story or Tin House – archives.

Parlor New York is a chic, black-walled, members-only nightclub and was a great venue for the evening. As one party attendee told me, “It reminds me of my mother’s place.” I asked him what his mother did for a living, thinking he’d say she was an art curator or psychologist or something else that made her ‘edgy’ and maybe a little ‘neurotic.’ But no– “She’s a middle school lunch lady,” he replied. When I arrived a little after 8, the room with the bar was already packed, and the DJ was spinning ’70s era sexy disco. The crowd was swilling whiskey, because we at EL are very pro-whiskey, and also because the party was sponsored by Tullamore Dew (coincidence? I think not!).

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Lit Prom Night 2012 – Small Press and Literary Magazine Night at Housing Works SoHo

1. Volunteers Tom MacDonaugh and Katherine “Cookbooks, Mainly” Willis–Student of Science and Marketing Assistant at John Wiley & Sons Publishing–happily posing with Peebers. 2. Guest editor and vocalist Katie Vogel, MerchPersonVolunteer Ann Duensing and Poet Hannah Webster examining the…guest list?

May is a good month, especially if you live in New York City. You get your tax return, the city warms up, it’s Morrissey’s birthday month (22nd, I hope all of you celebrate), and the best part: lit people are still celebrating Literary Magazine and Small Press Month. Ok, it’s really like a year, every year. Last night harlequin creature, Ugly Duckling Presse, and the Agriculture Reader partied with a bunch of us at Housing Works in SoHo with poetry and fiction readings, music from the Relatives and Isaac Gillespie, and free beer. This is all I ever want out of any party.

  

From P-Town… Wandering Creative Space with Chimamanda Adichie

1. On the last block to the Schnitz, I realize that it’s still light out at 7pm which means summer is closer than ever. 2. Adichie on stage at the Schnitz, looking fabulous. 3. Rob Spillman and Jon Raymond head over to the post-lecture reception at the Gus J. Solomon U.S. Courthouse. 

  

Chimamanda Adichie visited Portland for the first time as the season finale speaker for the Portland Arts & Lectures series. Andrew Proctor, Executive Director of Literary Arts, bullied her into coming and held a brief thank-you-a-thon prior to her introduction. I have to agree that the Literary Arts staff is 100% amazing. Adichie said she didn’t mind being bullied by someone like Proctor.

Her talk, A Cultural History of My Writing, began with the words, “As a child in Nigeria . . .” and circled back to #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue several times as she described her writing life. Adichie has already proven herself in several genres and snagged a genius award. If she cut this lecture to about three and a half minutes and kept the #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue refrain, it’d probably be an excellent pop song or perhaps a ballad, given that she is drawn to beautiful sadness and has a dark artistic vision which keeps her from writing for children.

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Veterans’ Reading at NYU

1. Workshop Fellow Lizzie Harris with KABOOM author and workshopper, Matthew Gallagher. 2. Reading newcomers, Sonya and Keerthi.

 

It is appropriate that my last post as a writer for The Outlet covers a reading close to me and what I think is simply one of New York’s best readings to hear immediate, affective, and electric literature.

This past Saturday’s annual Veterans’ Reading at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, while having a connecting theme of veteran readers, features in its production the diversity and contradiction that is often missed at other readings around the boroughs. There are men and women; unpublished writers, like Jeremy Warneke; and heavy-hitters, like Rick Moody. It takes place in a picturesque townhouse in the West Village, yet is held under the tutelage of a University. There are young writers and MFA holders, poets and novelists, musicians and photographers, Army and Navy, activists and ambassadors, all housed under the same roof to hear stories from one very particular community: a community of veterans.

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Comedies of the Cataclysm: Vol. 1 Brooklyn Presents Matt Bell at RAC

1. Rahawa Haile, fiction writer and literary reading regular. Seriously. She goes to more of these than me, and has a fantastic head of hair. 2. Jeff Brewer, fiction writer, Dorian Gray aficionado and diaper conversationalist; with Nicole Treska, Jeff’s minion (for fun) and writer. Both work at City College. We talked about diapers and Oscar Wilde for ten minutes. No joke.

 

While everyone else either enjoyed the warm evening in a park or participated in Occupy’s May Day “festivities,” a handful of us found ourselves at CULTUREfix in the LES for another stellar Vol. 1 Brooklyn reading. This time they celebrated and launched Matt Bell’s —  editor at The Collagist and Dzanc Books –  novella-in-shorts, Cataclysm Baby. The Vol. 1 boys know how to throw a good reading, and brought Melissa Broder (MEAT HEART), Jacob Silverman, Lincoln Michel (Founding Editor at Gigantic) and EL’s own Julia Jackson to make it a literary evening full of lasagna, spontaneous assisted suicide attempts, a new authoritative history of the United Statesian religion, and a daughter’s voice that, if recorded, probably sounds like doom metal octave fuzz.

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CELEBRITY BOOK REVIEW: Jonathan Franzen on Adam Levin’s Hot Pink

In the vein of overt formal experimentation, Adam Levin’s short story collection, Hot Pink, reminds me of my childhood introduction to the branded breakfast cereal Froot Loops. Saccharine; excessive and ferociously colored, the pleasure one derives from reading Hot Pink is vivifying and caloric—the literary equivalent of a “sugar high.” Of the ten tales in this collection, I despised one; was indifferent to three; and found myself smiling through the other six: that is why I am giving this collection a positive review, and also why I have scheduled an X-ray computed topography of my cerebral cortex for next Tuesday.

As one unversed in the art of failure, I was terrifically bemused by Levin’s luckless characters. In “RSVP,” for example, the pathologically shy Donald pens “the world’s greatest love letter—four lines long, a mere seventy words” to the even shyer Janet, who, through a series of literal wrong turns, is promptly eradicated by a bus before receiving said letter. In “Scientific American,”—my favorite tale, I think—a hapless couple is rendered even more so by the appearance of a nihilistic gel oozing from their bedroom wall. When the nameless hero schedules an appointment with the builder for a time when neither he nor his wife can be present, this oversight causes him such overwhelming embarrassment, he comes to see himself as “a great imposition, not only on the builder but on his wife, the whole world.” Guilt, disorganization, disappointment, flailing—it’s fearful, the catalog of emotions experienced by people incompetent in life.
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