NYC Events I Can't Attend But You Can and Should

I'll be out of the city most of this week, traveling to Los Angeles to do research in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences archives for The Karen Black Project. I'm excited, of course, but it means that I'll be missing a bunch of interesting literary events here in New York. KGB is hosting Gary Sherbell Tuesday night; I don't know anything about his novel, Talking to Richard, beyond the paragraph on the bar's website, but a story about a lawyer who wakes up with another lawyer's head where his penis used to be should be different. Sure, you're thinking it'll be different by being bad, but people probably thought that about Chester Brown before Ed the Happy Clown kicked into gear. Anyway, Wednesday night will be a bit more conventional, as Rebecca Goldstein and Adam Langer take the podium.

Bluestockings is on a roll this week. Tuesday they'll be supplying books for a Monique Truong reading at Lolita as part of the Cupcake series; Truong, you might recall, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Literary Award back in April for The Book of Salt. Wednesday, they get behind Lisa Dierbeck's reading at Knit for her debut novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller. And on Thursday, they bring the party to the store for "an evening of feminist science fiction" featuring Ellen Datlow, Carol Emshwiller, Nancy Jane Moore, Sue Lange, and Marleen Barr--the last of whom I've seen read before; she's fearlessly enthusiastic and her high energy is awfully contagious.

But if you go to that Thursday night, you'll miss a poetry reading at NYU's Tishman Auditorium featuring three Knopf authors: Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, and Edward Hirsch. Then again, you can always catch Levine at Three Lives on the 20th...and if you didn't catch my earlier announcements about Elisabeth Frank and Alan Hollinghurst reading there this week, consider yourselves alerted now. If you want any more suggestions, why not do what I do every Monday and visit Maud's blog for Lauren Cerand's top picks?