Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘readings’

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Allison Amend's Tips for a DIY Book Tour

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

The current Glimmer Train Bulletin features a short essay by Allison Amend with her instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Book Tour. Amend is the author of the acclaimed 2008 story collection Things That Pass for Love. Her novel Stations West publishes this month. Here is the opening of her essay: It is a truth universally acknowledged that book tours don’t really sell books. Or at least they don’t sell a lot of books in comparison to the amount of time and expense involved. So then why do authors continue to go on them? Well, book tours have ancillary benefits, otherwise publishers […]


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The Paris Review and Barnes & Noble Series in NYC

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

New York readers, ring in the New Year with a month of Monday readings to celebrate The Paris Review’s iconic interview series. Starting this Monday, January 4th, the Barnes and Noble flagship store at 86th and Lexington, in New York City, will host a month-long series of interviews showcasing authors, artists, and editors discussing writers, writing, and the writing life. The first event will feature Benjamin Percy–one of our favorite authors here at FWR–who will be interviewing Carol Sklenicka about her recent biography of Raymond Carver. Here is the schedule of the events: Monday, January 4th at 7:00pm: Benjamin Percy, […]


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Bread Loaf Lectures and Readings Available on iTunes

by Celeste Ng

Didn’t make it to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer? You can now download many of the lectures and readings from the 2009 session for free on iTunes. A partial list is available now; more will be added soon. Lectures include Ellen Bryant Voigt on irony, Charles Baxter on lush styles in prose, and Thomas Mallon on the letters of presidents . And there’s a wide selection of fiction readings, including faculty members Maud Casey, Thomas Mallon, and Luis Alberto Urrea; special guest Lorrie Moore; and fiction fellows Lauren Groff, Aryn Kyle, Skip Horack, and many more–plus readings by […]


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Largehearted Lit, with Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Emma Straub

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn). We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create and discuss music playlists connected to–or inspired by–their books. Now a new Largehearted Lit series, curated by Brooklyn-based fiction author Jami Attenberg (Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season), actualizes these playlist interviews into live readings with musical performances. In this interview, David […]


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Mentors, Muses, and Monsters event at Greenlight Books

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read. This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers. On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I […]


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recommended event: The Brooklyn Book Festival

This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]


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Margaret Atwood's book tour / fundraiser / theatre piece

To promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood will be touring five countries and thirty-five cities, performing staged readings with trios of local actors who will also sing some of the book’s original hymns (set to music). A number of these events will also serve as fundraisers for BirdLife International. Here’s the author’s own take on the project (via the Times Online), and you can follow the tour’s progress on her blog and Twitter. Atwood gracefully owns “book tour overkill,” joking that “[t]wittering, or is it tweeting?” is actually quite “appropriate for a bird-saving project!” In […]


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Symphony Space: Selected Shorts

by Celeste Ng

NY-based (or visiting) writers: More short story love, this time with actors: Symphony Space presents “Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story,” in which “spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers take on a new life when they are performed by stars of the stage and screen.” Hosted by Isaiah Sheffer, performances often focus on a theme; for example, “Living Life to the Fullest” included Neil Patrick Harris reading “The Canoeists” by Rick Bass and Mia Dillon reading Pam Houston’s “How To Talk to Hunter.” And the series features plenty of stories by young/emerging writers, too, including Karen […]


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recommended Book Tour podcast: Daniyal Mueenuddin and Justin Torres

When Alan Cheuse spoke with FWR last month, he highly recommended Daniyal Mueenuddin’s story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a book now teetering at the top of my “must-read” pile. In the meantime, we can all hear Mueenuddin read from his work via this NPR podcast from a recent Granta-sponsored event at McNally Jackson. Also on the bill is emerging writer Justin Torres (currently a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, formerly a McNally Jackson employee), whose fiction has appeared in Tin House, Granta, and other magazines; here, he reads “Lessons,” a three-part story published in Granta 104: Fathers.




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