Mixing Business With Pleasure

I was "holding court" at Hudson Bar & Books last night--by which I mean that when a couple of authors and publishing insiders independently expressed interest in getting some drinks, I came up with the location. I started the evening with some friends from Continuum Books, congratulating them on last week's Newsday profile of Jonathan Coe, which gave prominent placement to his biography of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson, although it should be noted the Sun scooped them by a week. (Not that you can really tell, since the Sun forces readers to pay to see just about anything, even from today's stories.) Like a Fiery Elephant is also up for the BBC's "Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction," and I'm looking forward to digging into it. (UPDATE: He won!)

Anyway, we were joined a little later by Lauren Cerand, still glowing from the success of her Steve/Dallas reading last week (and reminding me that Dallas Hudgen's website is a blog).

We'd just started in on the second bottle of shiraz when Robin Epstein and Renée Kaplan, the co-authors of Shaking Her Assets, came to our table. After they ordered their own white wine, we settled in for a nice long chat about all sorts of things, nearly all of which flitted out of my head because, after all, I helped three other people work on two bottles of shiraz. I seem to recall something about strangers looking at our CD collections, and Mandy Patinkin's transformation into a poor man's Scott Bakula, which gives you an idea of the non-literary tenor of much of the conversation.