Please, Mr. Broderick
paperhaus October 29th, 2008
Say yes to the nice Twist & Shout people. Friday, the Village Halloween Parade, you and Cameron and that skinny girlfriend and a really beautiful car. Or really, just you.
Shake it up for Bueller.
Archive for the 'events' Category
Book Expo is coming
paperhaus May 29th, 2008
I’ve gone to Book Expo twice before, and still I feel entirely unprepared for BEA 2008.
The first year, it was in Washington DC. I stayed at an unfortunately expensive shitty hotel; I had to wait in line as an intense guy checked in before me. I had never seen him before. But somehow I knew it was Ed Champion, and when he turned away from the desk, I tried saying “Ed,” loudly. He turned. Yep, it was Ed. This year, Ed will not be at BEA. Seems wrong, somehow.
Last year, in New York, I stayed with non-book friends in Brooklyn — they provided a welcome dose of sanity even though NY transit added hours to my travel time. (Strangely, those same friends will be in LA this year just in time for BEA. Maybe they’re all bookish after all). Last year, the LBC had a party, and I got to meet more fellow litbloggers and publishers and a logjam of authors. Running late the next morning, I worried that I’d miss the panel I wanted to see, but realized one of its members — Christopher Hitchens — was standing right in front of me on the escalator. I followed him. He was grumpy about morning. I walked onto the floor and was dazed by the enormity of it — or maybe by the heat (the air conditioning in Javitz was on the fritz). I had a marvelous time, sort of full-to-overflowing, all of it, including my bags, with books.
This year I have planned. I have a schedule. I am in my own town (yes, I am here, in LA, which I have reclaimed, by the way). I know when William Shatner is supposed to be signing his new book, that Alec Baldwin is speaking at a breakfast, that George Hamilton is throwing a party. That Salman Rushdie is going to be hanging out, cracking jokes. But there’s so so much that I don’t know. I might even see you there.
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Festival of Books, here I come
paperhaus April 2nd, 2008
So the LA Times Festival of Books is coming up and it turns out I’ll be moderating two panels, both chock-full of wonderful novelists.
Saturday, April 25, 4:00pm
First Fiction: New Voices
- Antonia Arslan, Skylark Farm
- Rebecca Curtis, Twenty Grand
- Pamela Erens, The Understory
- Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America
These women are all nominees for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (along with Dinaw Mengestu for The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, who apparently can’t make it).
And then on Sunday, at 10:30am
Fiction: Unconventional Voices
- Ben Ehrenreich
- Keith Gessen
- Lydia Millet
- Yannick Murphy
Please come. I promise to keep my moderator self out of the way so you can get the best of all these great writers. When we’re done, after you go to their booksignings, say hello to me, the redhead standing around with my hands in my pockets.
O’Nan and Pancake and Lee, oh my
paperhaus November 10th, 2007
Monday: Stewart O’Nan reads in the evening at Pitt, in the 5th floor room where we have workshop, featuring arching gothic windows and the occasional wintry breeze. Afterwards a few of us join O’Nan at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. As we stand around Chuck & Diane’s new great room, Diane makes nachos that look entirely delicious, but they end up inaccessibly between Chuck and Stewart. I never got one. I really, really wanted a nacho.
Wednesday: Ann Pancake joins us for our evening fiction workshop (yep, same room). Afterwards, she reads from her lyrical novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, about a West Virginia family dealing with local mountaintop removal mining. After that, a few of us join Pancake at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. I stop for beer, which we’d mostly finished off two days earlier. This time I confess to Diane how good her nachos looked, and this time, I get a few. Thanks, Diane.
Thursday: Don Lee visits campus as the first Fred R. Brown Literary Award winner. He lunches with grad students (including me), reads from his work — in a different room! different building, even! — has a handful of story conferences, and does a craft talk (back in the workshop room) on getting published. As he was at Ploughshares for a gazillion years, I would have loved to get his feedback on a short story I’d written; too bad I don’t write short stories. And if beer and nachos were on the agenda again, I missed it — too pooped.
So much literariness in one week! You’d think this was New York or something.
The only thing better than reading about a party you missed
paperhaus November 9th, 2007
… is reading about a BAD party you missed. Thank you, James Marcus. Thank you, Atlantic, for not sending me an invite.
Picture this: as you enter the auditorium at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the first thing you see is 150 or so people on the stage. They’re having a cocktail party. You, the audience, are not.
My old high school is having an online party, webcasting the Exeter-Andover football game this Saturday. Alum John Irving will probably be too busy to tune in — he barely had time to type a paragraph on his latest project for the NBCC.
LAist is keeping up with the writers’ strike: photos of puppies, kids, and actor Jerry O’Connell.
Also in LA, a sad party/commemoration: on November 19, Laila Lalami, Chris Abani and more read for Mutanabbi Street, the street of booksellers in Baghdad, which was bombed in March (30 people died and 100 were injured). It’s part of the Aloud series at the LA Public Library.
Dave Eggers returns to Pittsburgh
paperhaus October 30th, 2007
Dave Eggers returns to Pittsburgh with Valentino Achak Deng. They focused on What is the What, Valentino’s story, and showed slides and video from a trip they took to southern Sudan. Yep, that’s a broken plane Valentino is pointing to; apparently it’s hard to find an airstrip without one.
Mark Z. Danielewski returns to Pittsburgh
paperhaus September 28th, 2007
Mark Z. Danielewski read from both House of Leaves and his latest, Only Revolutions, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers last night in Pittsburgh. I’d put the crowd at 100+, and every single person stood in line to get books signed. Which was worth it, because Danielewski used brightly colored pens and personalized each autograph. Cool.
The Q&A session had a few clunkers, including a question about how to get famous authors to blurb your publish-on-demand book (huh?). But a few weren’t so bad.
Q: How do you describe House of Leaves to people?
MZD: It’s a story about a family that moves into a house that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside.
on the genesis of House of Leaves -
MZD: It’s how I see the world. I see stories as a compilation of narratives and viewpoints.
on what publishers want -
MZD: All they want is something that’s done, that they can put a piece of cardboard on, and a barcode.
on literary criticism about his work (like Writing Machines) -
MZD: The reality is, most of it’s right, in my experience. Very smart people are spending a lot of time digesting, analyzing these texts. It’s interesting how much of it is spot-on.
on writing -
MZD: I like to write. I like to sit down and talk to my gorillas.
Kibbles and bits
paperhaus August 6th, 2007
I went to the Swink reading at Tangeirs to see Mark Sarvas (that’s him there in the pic, blurrily) and hear more from his new novel. I agree with everything Callie already said.
I thought I didn’t need anything but Word to write a novel. But today Andrew told me about Journler, which seems more bloggy but possibly helpful, and look, Gwenda is using Scrivener. Are these truly organizational tools, or are they just software-based stalling tactics?
Dammit, I just missed Aimee Bender. Again.
Which reminds me: I’m writing the LA book updates for a new company called 80108. Sign up for and get pithy book events news texted to your phone. In advance of readings happening.
Which reminds me, v.2: if you have a readings series, book launch, poetry slam, magazine party,or any other special event involving the written word, email me the deets at paperhaus (at) gmail.com.
Oh, to be in …
paperhaus June 13th, 2007
New York… tonight, for the Lit Magazine launch party, with Ed “The Dizzies” Park among the readers on the bill.
Los Angeles… on Sunday the 17th for Vermin on the Mount, with Pia Z. Ehrhardt and others.
New York… on Wednesday the 20th for the Interfictions reading at KGB, now with the mos excellent Matt Cheney on the bill.
Good storytellers, every one
paperhaus June 2nd, 2007
BEA is the Olympics of small talk. Everyone is witty and charming and has these fantastic little nugget-like stories that are on point and end with a laugh. Plus, the vocabulary is splendid. I feel like a JV tennis player from Trenton.
I know this because this year, my second at BEA, I’ve managed to shed my shyness and talk to people. Even two editors of the LA Times Book Review. At once.
Like many of the bloggers here, I’m too tired to do more than record a few impressions right now (note: Ed’s barest impressions still constitute serious posting). And if past experience is a guide, in a few days it will have all faded into one sepia-toned whirlwind. So this may be all there is.
- I don’t care if Christopher Hitchens’ latest book is a bestseller: he’s got to be heard to be fully appreciated. Definitely, if you can, see him speak in person.
- If you go to a panel that touches on short fiction, they will inevitably praise Kelly Link. Without noticing that she’s in the back of the room.
- Tell the publishing houses that you’re a litblogger and they smile and give you books and catalogs and their cards.*
- It takes a lot of guts to march up to someone and say “hi, I’m a litblogger.”
- Especially if that person happens to be Michael Dirda.
- Steve Wasserman, in post-white-suit mode, is still a natty dresser.
- Spotted early Saturday morning, Stephen Colbert was unshaven, posing with a full-sized standup of himself as if to prove that yes, he is indeed Stephen Colbert. It worked: his phalanx of fans prevented me from getting even a blurry cameraphone shot.
- Speaking of excrutiatingly funny men from the screen, yes, I’m sure that was Ricky Gervais standing in the shadow of the escalator, selfconsciously covering his nametag with his arm.
- John Leonard: will you adopt me?
- Ditto, Morgan Entrekin. Now that I google him I see he knows Chuck Kinder. Of course. Somehow, all roads lead back to Chuck Kinder.
- And my road leads away from this laptop right now. More, I hope, more soon, on book expo america 2007.
* Except for Penguin, who will tell you, “We don’t have any publicists at BEA.” Riiiiiiiiight.