Somehow, I managed to be an English major in New York without visiting Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. I fixed that last night around seven. Two hours and a few $5-suggested-donation beers later and Amanda, the events director, had to remove me from under the store’s sloping staircase, where I figured I’d hide forever and live among the books. In between I’d attended the launch party for Issue Two of The Coffin Factory, a new literary magazine that I’ve fallen for as suddenly and unconditionally as Housing Works. Contributors Adam Wilson, Carlos Labbé, Jeannie Vanasco, and Justin Taylor read excerpts from their Factory pieces to celebrate the launch before the evening flowed into beery schmoozing.

1. The ever-lively Coffin crew. Randy Rosenthal; co-founder, editor, and party animal; Laura Isaacman, co-founder and editor; Brendan Kiely, self-proclaimed ‘90s guy and managing editor; and Jessie Chaffee, managing editor. 2. Jeannie Vanasco, poetess-in-residence, reading about marital strife and backyard jungles.

Housing Works is a great place for a reading. Its large, open room was outfitted in dark wood, from the reader’s podium and chairs to the floor-to-ceiling bookcases displaying the colorful spines of used books. I thought I was in the library of an ancient, wealthy man of letters. Still, I wanted to tear the books down and stick my nose in their pages, huffing their musty smell. Everything I saw was donated: the labor, the used books, the new books by Adam and Justin, the copies of The Coffin Factory, the beer from Six Point (“It’s for a good cause, so everyone drink four!” Amanda suggested).

1. Carlos Labbé dwarfed by enormous window, reading about a massacre.

 Adam Wilson began the reading with an apologia for the sullen narrator of his story, “That Underlying Want.” “Don’t judge him,”Wilson said, “He means well.” The story was a darkly comic account of a man who leaves his stagnant relationship in New York to visit a dying friend at home. “He’s confronting death for the first time,” Wilson offered to explain why his narrator discussed sluts at the dinner table. Or in his own words: “Proximity to death does funny things to people, like make them horny. I’d seen it in the movies.” And who can argue with the movies?

Next to read was Carlos Labbé, who Granta named one of its best young Spanish-language novelists last year. Looking the part with his goatee and tufts of moustache, Labbé read The Coffin Factory’s English translation of his story, “The Organ Operation of Fuenteovejuna Street.” It’s the story of a man whose dreams are haunted by childhood memories of political violence. Labbé guided the audience through shock, fear, and uneasy laughter (the narrator asks: “Mom, what’s a barricade?”) in one sweeping, Faulknerian sentence.

1. Why so glum, guys? It’s a lit party! Matthew, writer and cell phone photo blogger, and Justin Taylor, hilarious writer and enthusiastic reader. 2. The hungry masses, yearning for their literary fix. 

Jeannie Vanasco broke up the fiction-and-dude-fest with her prose poem cycle, “Nothing Unusual to Report.” She read her poems like they were a lost mythology where the real melted into the surreal, only to set again as the ordinary. Get a load of this place: “Forget the water tower made entirely of light, the burning mermaid fountain encrusted with diamonds, the golf course on ancient burial grounds, my store is the most magical place in town.” The audience was enchanted. Vanasco tried to skip over a longer poem, but her editor protested: “No, read the whole thing, it’s so good!” I’m glad Vanasco listened.

Justin Taylor ended the evening with “A Talking Cure,” a story about a pair of engaged grad students. The narrator’s boyfriend searches for Stonewall Jackson’s arm while she searches for a witch in a WoW-style RPG, until they make the mutual mistake of engaging in a drunken “truth session.” Opening up about their sexual pasts leads to hurt feelings and awkward polyamory. Sounds like grad school to me.

I have many recommendations from last night, and here are a few: Go to Housing Works as often as possible (they have a Friday happy hour!), maybe apologize to Amanda for me. Check out Adam Wilson’s debut novel, Flatscreen. Read both issues of The Coffin Factory, preferably over a Sixpoint. And finally– don’t go to grad school.

***

–Sam Gold is in grad school. He lives in Brooklyn and is writing his thesis on theories of symbolic exchange between his fist and your face.

Welcome back to the Critical Hit Awards for book reviews. This is a round-up, a recommended reading list, and—why not?—a terribly prestigious and coveted prize. Nominate your favorite review of the month by tweeting it at @electriclit with the hashtag #criticalhit or cast your vote in the comments section below.

Hard to believe, but in a month when Luc Sante dropped some knowledge about Patti Smith, Ben Marcus got everyone talking about The Flame Alphabet, and our beloved readers came through with some great nominations, none of those book reviews actually won. I know, I know. You’re aghast. Well, the competition for Critical Hit Awards is brutal. Here are this month’s winners.

(Thanks to @CalJoPo, @t_nesbit, @TradePaperbacks, @benasam, @msnowe, and @thelazyw for nominating book reviews this month!)

Best Flame Retardant

Girl Land by Caitlin Flanagan
Reviewed by Meghan O’Rourke in New York
Nominated by @msnowe

Other critics don’t so much review Caitlin Flanagan as attack her. But Meghan O’Rourke keeps her cool and spells out exactly what’s missing from Flanagan’s “cultural history of girlhood.” O’Rourke can be radically mellow: “If your daughter is a relatively engaged teenager with an active academic life, worrying over whether she has sex at 16 or 19 is not unlike fretting over whether the kindergarten serves anything sugary at snack time.”

Best Annotation

The Patio and The Index by Tan Lin
Reviewed by Peter Nowogrodzki in Full Stop
Nominated by @benasam

If you’re not familiar with the Latin etymology of “concrete” and the rhetorical device of antanaclasis, you may be in grave danger of not fully appreciating Tan Lin’s memoiristic text about language, family, and geology. Peter Nowogrodzki is here to help. His review is like a set of footnotes—the history of field guides to birds!—that make Lin’s work sound brilliant.

Best Indictment

The Tender Hour of Twilight by Richard Seaver
Reviewed by Choire Sicha in Slate

“The fabled Golden Age of publishing” is the backdrop for Richard Seaver’s memoir. In Choire Sicha’s telling, the Grove editor’s life becomes a dashing tale of financial risk and impeccable taste. That is, until Sicha calls Seaver “the very face of institutional sexism in publishing” and reminds us, as a former Gawker editor, that publishing is always a murky business.

Read a good review lately? Nominate it for a Critical Hit Award by tweeting it at @electriclit with the hashtag #criticalhit or cast your vote in the comments section below.

***
– Brian Hurley is over here.

 

All There Is: Love Stories from Storycorps
by Dave Isay

 
 
 
 
 
***
–Ryan Chang is a writer and student living in Brooklyn. His work has previously appeared on Thought Catalog. He is in the internet here and here.

Way to go for WORD of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Last night’s Treasure Island!!! event kicked off the month of February with rum, adventure, and the American sensibility of self-improvement! And yes, that’s Treasure Island with three exclamation points—author Sara Levine’s editor wouldn’t have it any other way.

1. Jason Diamond and Sara Levine during the Q&A.  2. The mutineering crowd during the publishers’ introduction.

WORD is a bright, cozy, and popular place. The colorful walls and hum of activity in the air put me in mind of a hip, lively living room party. Plus the rum— the rum definitely helped. The crowd sipped and listened to the travails of the unnamed narrator of Treasure Island!!!. Sara Levine was funny, as was her material—- full, as it was, of “Boldness! Resolution! Independence!” and “Horn-blowing!” And based, as it was, on “A classic. Gold letters said so right on the cover.” The book’s narrator, much like Ben Franklin, is hell-bent on good old American self-improvement, yielding mixed—but funny—results.

After we learned, to our disappointment, that modern-day aspiring pirates may not have the cleanest psychological bills of health (Long John Silver never had therapists to go through, one after another, unlike our narrator), it was time for a little Q & A with Jason Diamond (of Vol.1 Brooklyn). The questions bounced from adventure, to gender, to the fragility of American suburbia, and back.

Levine also explained the origins of her modern day yearning-for-adventure tale: “[Robert Louis] Stevenson wanted to make things easy for himself so he said, ‘I’m gonna write a book without psychology and without women.’ I decided to write a book with psychology and women.”

1. Between the Covers: A matchmaking service for book lovers.  2. The welcoming and pretty bookstore that is WORD.

Signed copies were available afterwards, along with temporary tattoos proclaiming Steer the Boat!, though the environment and subject matter of the night were just about hip enough to warrant a permanent tattoo artist rendering services on board.

Returning up the stairs from the galley, I was met once again by the cheerful vibe of the bookstore. Good books abound in the shelves, complete with employee reviews, as is common to bookstores. Unique to WORD, however, was their ingenious “Between the Covers” bulletin.

Whatever your romantic or literary preferences may be, you are invited to post them at this local bookstore—in the hopes of finding a soulmate. No pictures grace the bulletin board, but then you can’t judge a book by its cover.

1. Sara Levine beaming with the true treasure: literature. 

Judging Levine’s Treasure Island!!! by its title, I would expect a rip-roaring adventure similar to the original tale. But as Levine says, “The story is not about physical adventure. It’s about what it means to live an adventurous life.”

About this, the audience was clearly excited. As for myself, all I can say is: Ahoy!

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

***

–Emma Rock is a Brooklynite writer, student, and sketch-comedy-radio personality. Her work has previously appeared scribbled on subway ads and bathroom stalls. You can hear her on WBCR Brooklyn College Radio every Monday from 4-5 on Vernaculus.

I’d been hearing some buzz around the new(ish) reading series Fiction Addiction, but had failed to make it out to see what all the talk was about. Then I met the series’ curator, Christine Vines, at Franklin Park earlier this month, and, after being impressed by both her writing skills and sweetness, I decided I really had to get over to 2A this month to check it out. This month seemed to be an especially good place to start, with the theme being “Potential” (fitting for the new year), and the readers including Said Sayrafiezadeh, Joshua Furst, Nadia Kalman and Tanya Rey.

1. Tanya Rey, reading about Cuba & underage sexuality. 2. Writerly love: Hannah Tinti & reader Said Sayrafiezadeh. 

The series is held in the second floor of the bar, which is a small room that is still made comfortable by plenty of places to sit, lean, and — if you’re me — rest your notebook to frantically scribble notes. There’s candles, there’s big windows, the walls are a soft cream and warm brown– it’s evident that this neighborhood, and this bar, has gotten a make-over in the past few years. Music and laughter drifts up from the bar-goers downstairs, but they’re far enough away that you can still make out each reader’s words without becoming distracted. So, in short, it’s a perfect space to have a reading.

Tanya Rey, who has glowing skin and shiny hair and looks all of seventeen, was the first reader. She told us that she felt like DJ Laz opening up for Lady Gaga, and, “if you don’t know who DJ Laz is… exactly.” She read from her novel-in-progress, which takes place in Cuba and Miami, but the section she read from was a Cuba chapter. We heard about the “summer of good fights,” and two young girls whose friendship turned into something more. There was a tastefully-done sex scene, which followed a piece of wisdom that I’ve picked up from Amy Hempel: If you want to write about sex, the scene has to  be explicated by something else (the “something else” here was birds). Rey is someone to definitely keep an eye on– girl really knows how to craft a sentence.

1. Nadia Kalman at the mic. 2. Christine Vines & Penina Roth: Two of NYC’s hottest reading series curators, taking a break from their bitter, bitter rivalry. 

Nadia Kalman went next, and said that this was one of the most “innovative and terrifying” reading series, pointing to the big screen-sized projection of herself on the brick wall of the building across the street (Oh, did I forget to mention that? Fiction Addiction bonus: if you read here, you will literally be as big as a movie star). She read a section in which any relationship’s potential would be tested: when we take our significant other to meet our family for the first time. We were treated to a Passover scene with Russian Jews, in which they argued over the first line of Anna Karenina. (“No one in America knows how Anna Karenina actually starts,” said an especially codgy relative.) The prose was lively, clear, and bitingly funny.

1. My “helper” (a.k.a. “boyfriend”) went out on the street to get this one of Joshua Furst. (Thanks, David!) 2. Said Sayafiezadeh on the big screen.

Joshua Furst was the third reader of the night, and read to us from One Inch Tall, his novella, which opened up in an awesomely brutal way, featuring “ax-wielding trolls,” “pelts of human scalp,” and “daggers of icy fear.” Furst’s nerdy humor made me wish my nerdiest-of-nerds BFF was there to enjoy it (she’s got a twenty-sided dice tattooed on each wrist, for christsake, and would have loved Furst dropping nerd bombs like “+1 agility”). We segued seamlessly into more traditional territory, with a clueless and very nerdy narrator who did things like prematurely express his love, which resulted in a slammed door in the face. But potential prevailed– by the end of the section, the narrator had fallen into a requited “dependence called love.”

Said Sayrafiezadeh was the final reader of the evening. He told us that he’d lived two blocks east from 2A when he first moved to NYC in the ’90s, back “when this area was a shithole.” His apartment featured luxurious amenities such as a toilet that didn’t properly flush and a non-functional refrigerator. “I used to walk by this bar and think [the people outside] were the coolest people I’d ever seen,” he said. “And now look at us.” He read “Most Livable City” from The Paris Review, which featured: Pittsburgh, a bus strike, a stroke-victim neighbor, and a lecherous boss. Oh, and tons of good one liners, such as “My cock feels full with the thought of you in my heart.”

My verdict on Fiction Addiction? Between the talented writers, the big screen, and the comfortable space, the series is highly recommended. Catch it monthly, on the last Tuesday of each month.

The Cosmopolitans
by Nadia Kalman

The Sabotage Cafe (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Joshua Furst

When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir
by Said Sayrafiezadeh

***

–Julia Jackson is a fiction writer and the editor of Electric Dish. Find her on the internet here.

Is there anything better than a sad love song? I’ve checked–there isn’t. Here is a brief list of some of my all-time favorites to get you through Valentine’s Day, whether or not you’ve got a date. Each and every one of these songs is vetted (by me) as a song that you can listen to on repeat, either pining for a lost love, being sad about being lonely, or still being mad at that guy who cheated on you in high school. Extra points go to anyone who burns this onto a CD and listens to it in their car and/or lives in a dorm room and/or with their parents, places were self-indulgent sadness is best appreciated. This mix includes songs that I know I’m supposed to be embarrassed to love, but hey, this is an irony-and-coolness-free zone.

1. Al Green — Tired of Being Alone
So plainly stated, so perfectly sung.

2. Otis Redding — Try A Little Tenderness
My love for this song began with Duckie lip-syncing in Pretty in Pink, which still makes my heart skip a beat.

3. The Beach Boys — God Only Knows
I usually like to keep God out of my personal life, but in this case, I make an exception.

4. Belle and Sebastian — My Wandering Days Are Over
For when you’re ready to settle down.

5. Big Star — Thirteen
If this song doesn’t give you middle school flashbacks, you have no soul.

6. Billy Bragg + Wilco — At My Window Sad and Lonely
Subtle, no, but oh, the harmonies! This song makes me wish that I could sing.

7. Roxy Music — More Than This
There really is nothing more than this, it’s true. Can sound satisfied or bereft, depending.

8. Chet Baker — But Not For Me
Really, the question is not ‘why this song?’ but ‘how did you manage to make this list and not only include Chet Baker songs, Emma?’

9. Elliott Smith — Say Yes
I saw Elliott Smith in concert a number of times, and every time, I would crowd near the front and shout out my requests for the encore. Once, he sang this just because I asked him to.

10. Erasure — A Little Respect
There has never been a better song for a one-person dance party.

11. Feist — The Park
The best, saddest love song in years.

12. Mary J. Blige — Real Love
In my heart, it is always the 90s.

13. Patty Loveless — Blame It On Your Heart
That’s right–sometimes you need a little twang to get the job done right.

14. Rod Stewart — The First Cut Is The Deepest
Like I said, this is an irony-free zone, and this song gets right in there.

15. Morrissey — The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get
I had this on CD single, which both dates me and proves that I am awesome.

16. The Magnetic Fields — Andrew in Drag
My dear friends The Magnetic Fields have written one trillion wonderful love songs, but this is my new favorite. (Their new record is out in March, but ‘Andrew in Drag’ is the first single, so it should be available now!)

Other People We Married
by Emma Straub

***
—Emma Straub is the author of Other People We Married, out now from Riverhead Books. She likes love songs, chocolate, cheese, her cats, and her husband, though not necessarily in that order.

Click here for more literary mixtapes from EL.

With our easy access to instant messenger and video chat, it’s hard to imagine a time when communicating by telephone was a big deal. Try imagining even further back, before the telephone, when letters sent the news, and Samuel Morse had yet to “press” Government to support his invention, an electrical telegraph system.

He was making a living as a painter and a painting teacher, having by then studied and the Royal Academy and completed his masterpiece, the Dying Hercules. According to the story, Morse was in New York, commissioned to paint a marquis, when he learned his wife was gravely ill. Though he immediately traveled home to be with her, he was too late; she had already been buried. Morse was always tinkering with electricity and inventions, but it may have been grief that spurred his obsessive interest in rapid long distance communication.

This letter was written ten years after Morse began pursuing the telegraphic device, four years after his first appeal to Government for funding and just three months before his second and last appeal, which won him $30,000 to build an experimental (and ultimately successful) line between Washington DC and Baltimore. As far as I can tell, he never taught painting again.

New York, Sept 27th 1842

My dear Sir,

In answer to yours of yesterday, I would say that at present I have not the conveniences for taking pupils in painting. I shall in all probability be absent the greater part of the winter in Washington but our Academy schools open in Oct. (about the middle.) and I shall be happy to put your son in the way of receiving the advantages which they afford, if you will direct him to call upon me.

It is my intention to press my telegraphic invention on the attention of the Government the coming session. If they will adopt it, I shall again be in a situation to take up my pencil, which has unavoidably been laid aside for some time.

Believe me, dear Sir, with sincere respect & esteem,
Your friend & Servant,
Sam: F: Morse

Letter caption: On sale at aGatherin’ for $20,000, agatherin@yahoo.com
Picture caption: Photograph of Morse, ca. 1845, with his hand on a telegraph. Smithsonian neg. no. 73-1504.

***
– Anna Knoebel has been writing letters since she was about eight years old, often to her grandfather, who would send them back edited. She worked in publicity at MGM Studios in Los Angeles and as the Managing Editor of zingmagazine before co-founding Abe’s Penny with her sister, Tess. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.

Wednesday night marked the latest of Bookforum‘s increasingly notorious Issue Release parties, this one at Hotel Americano.  I’d never seen the hotel before (hell, I’d never even heard of it and my husband works around the corner), but Grupo Habita‘s swankadelic new space fits in perfectly with surrounding Chelsea’s arty, clubby scene.  It’s actually a welcome, shiny sliver of cool in an otherwise desolate corner of the hood.

1. Hey Portlandia, I got your next episode right here: Full House flashback?  You got it, dude. 2. Do you see the man in the white shoes?  He’s was too busy to talk to me.  Why?  Because he was otherwise occupied.  Being awesome. 3. No, seriously.  Best Dancer of the BookForum party, hands down.  The white shoes are magical, but he remains a mystery.

Since the Bookforum party was straight booze — no lit chaser — I don’t have any specific readings to recount, so I’m left with only the flashes of the party that still remain in my brain after three, four, five glasses of champagne.   Furry sheepskin stools, Kanye blasting through the speakers, woman with red lipstick and Flock of Seagulls haircut.

Really, how does one write up a party when it was spent squished between beautiful young things all gyrating to Top 40 hits, your vision blurred from the sweat generated by communal body heat?

Perhaps I should just plagiarize the Last Night’s Party Blog:

 I vowed not to look back and I didn’t – I just walked backwards a little slower than I usually do. But it was the least I could do… It was the least I could do since she skipped class, missed sleep, ditched her friends and drank rosé even though she hates rosé… just to hang out with me…It wasn’t until I landed and Harry asked me what was the best party I had been to over there that I realized that I didn’t even care about parties right now. I cared about… you know what I cared about. In the cab I thought about how we didn’t need to talk to communicate. We didn’t need an indie soundtrack to control the mood. Or gogo dancers to heighten the senses. Or alcohol to make it mindless. But now reality sets in and I realize that I will have to adapt to the bullshit called “my everyday” again. Just when I was ready to learn a third language. Just when I was ready to eat sushi rolls that only come with Philadelphia cream cheese.

 Sorta poetic, mostly incoherent, a little ridiculous.  The style of Larry Mannequin’s Diary perfectly mimics the style of last night’s party.  A Bookforum Issue release celebration is hot, loud, crowded, a little obnoxious…and all over much too soon.

***

–Cassie Hay is a regular contributor to The Outlet.  Her essay, “Queen of Pain,” is in the current issue of New Letters.

San Francisco freaks and geeks who like to play dress-up and waltz beyond the midnight hour celebrated the macabre cartoon fantasies of Edward Gorey this past weekend at the 12th Annual Edwardian Ball. This year’s spectacular multidisciplinary tribute — featuring music, dance, theater, video, painting, sculpture, fashion, installation art, aerial acrobatics and absinthe-rootbeer cocktails(!!!) — was inspired by the cult author-illustrator’s The Iron Tonic (Or, A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley). What follows is a parody of the Gorey text with photos from the show.

The Eternal Balm
(Or, A Winter Night in San Francisco)

The tinies at the Gorey Ball
Danced brightly till they hit the wall.

Those who could not twirl stood upright,
Leather corsets binding most tight.

The lights blacked out and darkness reigned.
Upon her lips, the heathen stained.

The dance floor bounced with bursting busts,
Which cast a shadow on our trust.

A waltzing woman did decry,
“My hair is tall! My bosoms fly!”

Creepy crawling on their backs
Were centipedes and old ear wax.

A mellow voice came from above:
“Hey you, kind sir, is this your glove?”

Whack whack! It smacked across his face,
And thus he plummeted from grace.

His waltzing woman watched him fall
Then threw herself against the wall

Where children with their heads lopped off
Pined like dead butterflies on cloth.

Long rope, blue light, white ruffled skirt,
She left her soulmate in the dirt.

She tied the rope around her neck,
Asked her best friend to pay the check.

She climbed up high and bound the knot,
Her headless body soon to rot.

A noxious cloud then smeared the room
With absinthe-laced nightmare perfume.

See for yourself.

Check out the original Gorey story set to music by Schumann.

***
—Jesús Ángel García is a writer, musician, filmmaker, singer, dancer, whiskey drinker, sushi chef and discreet lover who will not post stories about you with jpegs of your cream on his face if you sleep with him. Some of his work may be found here.