John Wray: Looking Back at Brooklyn

The City section of this weekend’s New York Times features an essay by novelist John Wray about the time he lived in a DUMBO warehouse. He’d told me a little bit about that experience when I interviewed him back in 2001, because it was during that time that he wrote his debut novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, but the Times essay goes into greater detail, and also goes into his friendship with Mr. Toast, a neighbor of sorts who lived “in a late-model Hyundai Excel that he parked in a vacant lot next to the East River” and taught Wray the lay of the land.

Wray’s third novel, Lowboy, was published earlier this month, and last week he marked the occasion with a reading on the New York subway—the L train to Williamsburg, on the way to a more traditional reading/party. To promote the event, his publishers took a copy of Lowboy onto the subway and invited other people to read from it. (Wray’s the one who opens the video.)

15 March 2009 | uncategorized |