Chick Lit Authors Rally for War Relief

A group of Red Dress Ink authors got together at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan last night to drum up media interest in Girls' Night In, an anthology of short stories from 21 writers created to raise money for War Child, an international relief organization that's doing what it can to help children whose lives have been upended by combat in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the first American installment in a series which has raised close to a million dollars in several U.K. editions.

Co-editor Chris Manby flew in from Los Angeles to start the party while colleague Sarah Mlynowski signed copies at a nearby Borders with fellow Manhattanite Lynda Curnyn, where they were joined by bestselling authors Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and Carole Matthews, both of whom have stories in the collection--and who both have newly published novels worth checking out. (In fact, Alisa's tour for Playing With Boys is just about to start, and I may have another dispatch in a few weeks.) At the party, I also ran into Laurie Gwen Shapiro and Melanie Murray, whose first novel will be published by Red Dress next summer and sounds like it'll be an absolutely hilarious story. I even met up with Edward Wyatt, the NYT reporter who's started staking out his claim to the romance and porn ends of the publishing industry lately. (If I've left anybody out, it's only because the apple martinis were so good I kept asking for refills...)