The Outlet: the Blog of Electric Literature
The book blog that's bad for you.

The Sampler Platter: Saturday at AWP

1. My first panel discussion at Chicago Hilton had people sitting on the floor near the back. 2. Lori Ostlund discussing her experience ordering her collection of short stories, Bigness of the World. 3. Anthony Varallo recommends reading your story collection aloud to help discern order.

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On the morning of the last day of AWP, there were zero lines for badge pick-up and no tote bags or lanyards left.
I gave myself an extra hour of sleep and arrived in time for the Preparing Short-Story Manuscripts for Contests and Publication, which included panelists who recently won the Drue Heinz, Flannery O’Connor, University of Iowa, and Grace Paley prizes. No big deal there.

 
 

AWP Literature Party at Lincoln Hall

1. Lincoln Hall off Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park. 2. William Spadaro is a playwright from Austin and facial hair role-model. 3. Dorothy Lasky connecting to the audience, specifically the weird-ass hippies and horses.

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Sponsored by School of the Art Institute of Chicago Writing Program, Bookforum, featherproof, Hobart, HTMLGiant, The Lit Pub, Publishing Genius, and Wave Books, The Literature Party started two hours later than 8pm, which gave my sister and I plenty of time to relax with a beer and order food while the DJ played several tracks we couldn’t help singing to each other with too big smiles.
“What is this thing, again?” she asked.
“A bunch of writers and a reason to drink. Probably dancing,” I said.

HAPPY PILLS – Michael Ian Black with Meghan McCain at WORD

1. There was goldfish instead of booze. I did my best to control myself. 2. Faithful MIB fans gettin’ rowdy.

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Michael Ian Black hates his wife. Kidding! Sort of. Last night Greenpoint’s WORD hosted the launch party for Black’s new book, You’re Not Doing it Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations. The book sees Black taking an honest look at his marriage, sex, mortality, and memories of adolescence where his punk rock style cues came from “Duckie in Pretty in Pink.” Black invited Meghan McCain to join him on stage for a conversation that was promised to him to be full of “awkward questions.” The event was one of the funniest and most vulgar book-related events I’ve been to, and I’m glad Mr. Black was as honest on stage as he is in the book, admitting things like that he is scared of “large tits.”

Park Slope meets Cobble Hill: Brooklyn Writers Space Reading Series at Book Court

1. Michael Grabell, before I interrupted him while he was feeding his daughter to ask for another picture. Sorry again, Michael. 

spacer You’ve probably already noticed that this is the third BookCourt event The Dish has covered in a row. But if Adam Wilson’s dumpling-filled book launch was a quintessential literary release party, then last night’s Brooklyn Writers Space reading brought a different type of writer and reader to BookCourt. I figured this out when I walked in (late) and heard the sounds of children playing among the books. One cheerio-munching toddler wore a shirt with the words Money Well Spent?, which I assumed was a cruel admission of parental regret, or a reference to Marge ringing up Maggie in the opening credits of The Simpsons. Actually it was the name of her father’s book. To quote my fellow Dish-mate (Ryan Chang) who went with me, last night was a Park Slope Rager, full of professional writing types reading from their published pieces or works-in-progress while their future hip Brooklyn kids wandered through the store, surprisingly quiet.

Michael Grabell began the evening reading from his new book on the Obama stimulus package, Money Well Spent?, which immediately cleared up the shirt confusion. Grabell’s reading focused on a blogger named Liberty Bell, whom some credit with setting out the porcelain cups and nice silverware for the first Tea Party rallies. Even as Grabell described protestors with “teabags hanging from their hats,” his sense of humor backed away from satire, leaving his characters sympathetic and human.

Wandering with A Public Space

1. Crowd cold chillin’.

spacer It’s been busy for Cobble Hill’s BookCourt recently: the store hosted the dumpling extravaganza that was Adam Wilson’s launch party for Flatscreen (read Julia’s interview here), a launch party for the new literary journal The Bad Version, and last night they had the issue launch for the 15th issue of A Public Space. In this issue, writers of fiction, poetry and essay comment on the issue’s theme of wandering. APS invited poet Timothy Donnelly (The Cloud Corporation; most recently awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) and fiction writer/essayist Leslie Jamison (The Gin Closet) to read their contributions.

I got there a little early, which is both a good and bad thing. If I have cash on me and I’m in a book store, it’s hard to keep it in my wallet. Thankfully, BookCourt also has an amazing bargain section downstairs. I nabbed old issues of UNSAID and The Literary Review for a $1 each, and then glued myself in my seat with the new APS. I covered the last issue’s launch at BookCourt, which looked at the similar theme of the solitary walker. While I flipped through the issue, I thought about APS’ approach: the inclusion of different genres to communicate a theme is comprehensive and allows for a nuanced aesthetic that, even though two issues can hunt out similar narratives, generates a singular dialogue. In short, APS is legit.

Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen Launch at BookCourt

1. Paul Dano was there! Be still my heart! I mean, Paul Dano was there, he’s the star of the Flatscreen book trailer and some other things. NBD. 2. There were dumplings, which made everyone wonder why all lit events don’t have dumplings.

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It’s Adam Wilson week at The Outlet! Or maybe it’s Adam Wilson week in New York, or the universe, and we’re just trying to keep up. The number of people that turned out for the launch of Wilson’s debut novel Flatscreen at BookCourt corroborates the theory.

When you’re covering an event for Electric Dish, there are a couple things you hope not to find on arrival. Dingy lighting (bad photos). Ill-stocked bar. Or, in the case of this well-lit, wine-river party, a room so crowded that one step in any direction is a move into someone’s discomfort zone. It’s precarious for us, but it’s downright great — and a reflection of your greatness — if you’re the one whose week in the universe it is.

Salute Their Shorts! – Selected Shorts: An Evening with One Story Magazine

1. One Story staffers! Telia Sinkinson, Editorial Intern; Adina Talve-Goodman, Managing Editor; Pei-Ling Lue, Contributing Editor; Andrew Heaton, Editorial Intern. They posed, then Stephen ran to get a lens, to which they re-posed and said, “Maybe we should hug so we look like we like each other.” 2. Pretty, pretty stories.

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Some things I realized on my way to Symphony Space for “Selected Shorts: An Evening with One Story Magazine” last night: the 96th Street 1/2/3 stop is really pretty, Alec Baldwin is going to perform at Symphony Space soon, and their downstairs bar has trivia every Wednesday night. A few days ago, I was looking over the event description and wondered what “performed” meant: Was Joe Morton going to one-act Jim Shepard’s story? Is it possible to one-act Seth Fried’s work? When the evening commenced, it seemed that none of the actors attached to the One Story alumni were going to flounce around the stage. There was only a small table in the middle stage, with a vase of flowers and two cups of water. Instead, they lent their performance talents to the stories, and the whole evening felt like the adult version of story time: classy and a little dressed up… and I even got to drink a beer. The quadruple threat of Barbash/Cavanagh, Shepard/Morton, Fried/Fontana, and Binder/Minifie was a perfect evening of literature-as-performance.

Magickal Readism at the Bowery Poetry Club

1. Iconic view from the street . 2. Bird in the rafters, at attention. 

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“Love can transform us. It can be a healing force or a disaster, a tidal wave, a tornado. It can burn and scar us or heal our scars. It can be a ghost that haunts us or a best friend that reads our every thought. Love may arrive like an angel of mercy, a fairy with raven wings or a hairy beast that will tear us apart from limb to limb…” – Francesca Lia Block, from the intro to Love Magick.

On Sunday, Sarah Herrington, Jennifer Sky, Sloane Davis, Jessa Mendez, Alise Hamilton, Ashley Inguanta, Mike Stone, and Laura Thorne gathered at the Bowery Poetry Club on the Lower East Side to celebrate the latest collaboration curated by the love magick goddess herself, Francesca Lia Block. We were also reminded that love can suck you dry, make you want to live in a tree trunk, get you to chase after storms in order to find your missing lover, or just want to lounge in a warm bath orally addressing your rising seasonal desires.

Women Without Men

1. Feminist Press Executive Director Gloria Jacobs, introducing the evening with passion.

spacer  A large crowd gathered last night in the basement of the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate the glorious reissue of Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur’s elegant 1989 novel Zanan bedoone mardan (or, Women Without Men). For the first time ever, the Feminist Press has guaranteed that Parsipur will finally see royalties for this novella of magical realism that once landed her in prison.

The event took place in conjunction with the exhibition Shifters, currently on view at the James Gallery, and featured a screening of artist Shirin Neshat’s adaption of the novella into a film, Women Without Men (2009). In the ensuing conversation between Parsipur and Neshat, it becomes clear that both had markedly different interpretations about the value of the story Parsipur set out to tell.

“When  [the novella] was written, it was impossible to talk about politics. When Shirin made the film, she was free, she was out of Iran, she could talk about political change,” Parsipur explained. She is adamant in claiming she is not a feminist, yet her book tells the tale of several Iranian women, discontent with their position in daily life. Neshat weaves the 1953 coup d’etat of Iran in with the story of four female protagonists who use a mysterious orchard for salvation.

Meanwhile, in California… Taking Back the Inland Empire @ UCR’s Writers Week

1. Alexander Long signing his book Light Here, Light There.  While struggling over his dissertation, Philip Levine once let him hold the pen Larry Levis was writing with when he died.  “This is the pen he was using / as he rose from an elegy / to get some water / and then became an elegy.” 2. Is there anything that brings people together more than an annoying fire drill?  This got me all nostalgic for my high school days, when kids would pull the alarm just the pass the time.

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As I creep up exit 33 towards Blaine Avenue for the first time in a long while, I see the dusty parishioner that I expected to see.  He holds a sign that simply says, “BAD TIMES- God bless you,” and though I drive by him like the cold-hearted bastard that I am, I still want to know his story.  I consider it the first line of poetry of my day as I head towards my ol’ Alma mater, UC Riverside, to attend the final day of their 35th annual Writers Week.  When I was a young & terrified creative writing student, Writers Week readings were my first exposure to literary events.  These were people who were actually getting paid, so I went to as many events as I could and asked lots of questions.  I didn’t want to become a college statistic — one of the go-nowhere, do-nothing writers our teachers told us that most of us would become.  The readings were uncommonly

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