De Stijl

Here's the latest on my current projects, if you're curious...

Last night's edition of "Upstairs at the Square" with host Katherine Lanpher and guests Min Jin Lee and Mike Doughty was absolutely out of this world. In the next few weeks, Min Jin will be crisscrossing the country to promote the new paperback edition of her nationally bestselling debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires. I hear that David from Largehearted Boy plans to be at the event in Alabama! Last night's show will be up at bn.com/upstairs in a few days. Also, Min Jin contributed an entry to Tayari's "Cocktails with Writers" series. Good to have on hand while clicking refresh, refresh on Ms. Jones' give-for-a-great-cause auction this weekend.

Rudolph Wurlitzer's new novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, is getting serious critical raves (and inciting ecstatic reverie everywhere else, too). I  get an email or talk to someone every day who is like, WHOA. The latest is at the Barnes & Noble Review, and gets off to a brilliant start: "Thomas Pynchon. Scott Spencer. Dennis Cooper. William Burroughs. Donald Barthelme. John Ashbery. Michael Herr. Patti Smith. If you can legitimately judge a writer by fellow scribes who honestly extol his work, and count on his inhabiting a plane of popularity and celebrity similar to the one where his endorsers dwell, then Rudolph "Rudy" Wurlitzer should be a name on the lips of sage critics and fans of zesty, transgressive postmodernist fiction everywhere..."  Like any publicist with a brain, I seldom mention prospective coverage until it materializes in the physical world but I will say that in the middle of going over my notes this week, I put them down, went online and ordered a first edition of Rudy's first novel, Nog, on the theoretical assumption that in about a month, it will be both impossible to find and impossible to afford. Fortunately, the new one is fifteen bucks or less. Things are looking very good.

Janice Erlbaum continues to wins hearts and minds with her new memoir, Have You Found Her, still going very strong.  She's all over the place this week, writing about a weird date for Nerve in THE CREEPIEST, about the politics of admiration in "Let Us Now Praise People We Want to Have Sex With" for The Best American Poetry, plus recalling her stint as a drag king-- in the club and on the page-- with "Trying on My Dude Suit" for Kore Press's provocateurs' hangout, Persephone Speaks. If you're in New York, you can join us for a blindingly fabulous dose of the Janice Erlbaum Experience (tm) at Sunday Salon in Brooklyn this weekend. She's also got upcoming appearances at Sundays at Sunny's, Housing Works and the Other Means Reading Series. And then it's time for summer.

In an unrelated interview where she touches on one of her many enchanting life philosophies, the brilliant author and auteur Marjane Satrapi (who I have not worked with, save for a one-off event a few years ago) unwittingly sums up my delight in working with the Goethe-Institut New York, where I help publicize extremely intellectual events followed by free, boozy receptions full of good-looking Europeans in a landmark Beaux-Arts townhouse on Fifth Avenue (and downtown at Ludlow 38): ""I'm a lady." She likes the sound of lady so much that she repeats it, running it off her tongue with lascivious delight. "I'm a lady." She likes to mislead people, she says. "It is better not to look like what you are; it is better to look like a bourgeois woman because then all the doors are open for you and then you can just go and make hell. That is much more exciting." (via) Next up: The buzzworthy new "With God on Our Side: The Crisis of the Secular" series takes up "The Islamic Challenge," with Paul Berman and Paul Scheffer this Tuesday.

Comments

[david]

I am indeed planning to attend Min's reading, I only wish I could have set something up as part of my as yet unnamed reading series that merges music, art and literature with a (hopefully) open bar.

Rudolph Wurlitzer's novel is magical. I read between thre and five books a week, and didn't want this one to end. I also picked up Nog, and even though I didn't have the spare time, read it. Thanks for recommending the book, Lauren.