Better Off Dead: Coffin Factory’s Issue Two Launch Party at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

1. Michael Signorelli, Adam’s editor and beer rest; Adam Wilson, writer, Faster Times editor, mean-mugger; Sarah Rapp, Adam’s girlfriend and community manager at Behance; and Amanda Bullock, the Housing Works events director who brought these lit-loving beer-drinkers together. 2. Joe, Penguin representative, Tiffany, book blogger, and Robert, tie-wearing MTA employee who couldn’t tell me when I’ll be able to trust the Q train again. Between Tiffany and Robert: grade-A photo bomb. 

 

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.

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Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum (But Don’t Spill it on Me Book): Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!

1. Happy buccaneers milling around the rum punch.  2. Sara Levine in the swashbuckling act of READING!

 

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.

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Fiction Addiction — That’s Some Good $hi*

1. John, a photographer, & Lacey, a bartender, going back to the LES after feeling withdrawals from their recent move to Brooklyn. 2. As Brad Listi would say: “It’s a book, you can read it, oh my god.”

 

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.

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Boy With a Blog in His Side – Largehearted Lit’s 10th Anniversary at WORD Brooklyn

1. WORD’s “Vandalized by Author” wall. There weren’t any phone numbers. 2. Jen Gillmore, Dead Heads, joints.
 
David Gutowski, of Largehearted Boy and most recently Book Boroughing, describes himself on his Twitter bio as such: “I read and write and listen to music. A lot.” This is all you really need to know about Gutowski and his blog, who celebrated 10 years (!) of lit/music blogging at Greenpoint’s fantastic WORD bookstore last night with readings from Emma Straub (Other People We Married), Jen Gilmore (Something Red), a musical performance from Alina Simone (You Must Go and Win), and a ridiculously sweet raffle benefiting Girls Write Now.

 

From P-Town… A Salon Grows in Portland

1. A smoker’s view of SE Mall Street around 7:45pm. 2. The kitchen meets the dining room at the intersection of Dunbar and Coffelt.

 

On Friday, If Not for Kidnap, a living room poetry series curated by Donald Dunbar and Jamalieh Haley, brought Kevin Sampsell, Edward Mullany, Chloe Caldwell, Bryan Coffelt and The We Shared Milk to Dunbar’s house in Southeast Portland. Only one of the above is a poet, unless you count the band.

SE Mall Street is not well-lit compared to the glare of an iPhone’s Google Map in the hands of my passenger; however, we obtained a visual of what appeared to be several band members carrying amps and equipment headed towards a large house. After initiating pursuit we were led straight to Dunbar, who was greeting guests from his porch in front of a one-smoker audience. I was unable to get a usable picture of Dunbar at this point and waded through the people who like to stand in the kitchen towards a table with cold beer and book donations for Crow Arts Manor to get a better look at the crowd.

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Interview with Victoria Patterson, Author of This Vacant Paradise

In 2008, I was just a lowly undergrad at UC Riverside, finishing up my senior year. I was a creative writing major, and I had Victoria Patterson for one of my craft classes. Patterson was awaiting the publication of her first short story collection, Drift (Mariner Books), which she had worked on while in the MFA program at UCR. She quickly became one of my favorite professors, due to her assigning us really devastating novels (The House of Mirth, Revolutionary Road) while still managing to maintain a sense of humor about it all (see this example).

Since then, I’ve kept tabs on my former professor. Drift received glowing reviews for its stunning portrayal of outsiders in the gleaming, cutthroat town of Newport Beach, and the collection was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2009. Drift was followed by This Vacant Paradise (Counterpoint), Patterson’s first novel, which told the story of Esther, a beautiful-yet-flawed thirty-something living in Orange County in the ‘90s.

Having grown up in Southern California, never feeling like I completely fit in, the book really resonated with me. Patterson is an author who writes about what I’m thinking, taking a scalpel to the golden façade that is life in Southern California and exposing it for what it really is: contradictory, complicated, and brutal, but still sometimes beautiful.  Esther, for all her faults, was someone I empathized with and related to, with her simultaneous entanglement with the world of designer clothes and marrying for money, while searching – and hoping – for something more. In the end, This Vacant Paradise is a novel that is just as devastating and multifaceted as the books she taught us in class.

The novel was released in paperback earlier this month, and so I was delighted to do an interview with my former professor in celebration.

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Why We Need You, Blue… Tom Agnotti at Bluestockings

1. $1 for a cup o’ Joe. 2. Angotti standing behind his bookcover (not to scale).

 

 

Sitting front row, with a book authored by Fidel Castro to my left and murmurings from book buyers to my right, I knew I was in the welcoming-yet-active atmosphere of Bluestockings located at 172 Allen Street. If you haven’t been yet, you have to get there, it’s one of the best bookstores in the city. It’s a volunteer ran “bookstore, activist center, and free trade café” that’s occupied mostly by veterans of the occupy movement (see posters hanging from the ceiling).

Bluestockings usually features nonfiction but this time, fiction writer Tom Agnotti celebrated the premier of his newest story collection, Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths. His multi-genre short-story collection features illustrations by Sofia Vigas and, throughout the reading, the images were projected onto a nearby screen. The illustrations, which remind me slightly of Jamie Hewlett’s work, bookend each story with a haiku and foster a layered take to the collection.

MONSTERS at Franklin Park

1. Montana Ray shows off her gun-shaped poetry. 2. Ryan Britt, looking every bit the Brooklyn-based writer. 

“If you don’t think this is the best reading series in Brooklyn and in New York, you’re wrong,” began Ryan Britt, one of five readers at the Franklin Park Reading Series’ December installment this past Monday. Perhaps Britt was a bit overexcited to be reading for his second time at the well-regarded event, but he has a point– this past Monday alone featured the so-hot-you-can’t-miss-him Lev Grossman (The Magicians, The Magician King) and the newest nebbish hero of the literary scene, William Giraldi, whose debut novel, Busy Monsters, has garnered more attention than the seemingly-shy author likely knows what to do with.
 
 
 

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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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