2/3: Hannah Pittard Meets Like Fire @ Greenlight
If you’re in the New York City area, I hope you’ll be able to join me Thursday night (February 3rd) at Greenlight Bookstore for a reading by Hannah Pittard from her debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, after which Pittard will be interviewed by my friend Lisa Peet, the editor of the excellent literary blog Like Fire. The “Author/Blogger” pairings at Greenlight are always lively, and I’m looking forward to this conversation—I’m even cutting short a visit to the AWP conference in Washington, D.C., practically rushing straight from a speaking engagement to the train station so I’ll be back in Brooklyn in time for the event. Lisa has been very enthusiastic about the novel, and I’ve set it aside for my train ride down the Eastern seaboard tomorrow afternoon (weather permitting) with much anticipation.
Greenlight Bookstore is located at 686 Fulton Street in Fort Greene, right next to a C train stop, just a block away from a G train, and a short walk from the whole Atlantic/Pacific Avenue subway complex. The reading will start at 7:30 p.m., and although you don’t have to make reservations, if you do happen to be on Facebook, you can give us a heads-up; it’s always helpful to have a rough idea how many chairs to lay out.
1 February 2011 | events |
Colum McCann’s Hand-Picked Stories
Early in his introductory remarks last night, Colum McCann recalled a bit of literary insight another writer had passed on to him: The Irish were brilliant short story writers, he’d been told, because they had practice going to confession. (It was true, he added, describing how he’d catalogued all sorts of imaginary sins rather than tell the priests what he’d really done.) But the stories he chose to present for an evening of the “Selected Shorts” series at Symphony Space were only “confessional” in the broadest sense of the term. It began with McCann’s own brutally suspenseful “Everything in this Country Must,” read by Amy Ryan, followed by Mary-Louise Parker’s hilarious but poignant treatment of Anne Enright’s “(She Owns) Every Thing.” And then, after a brief intermission, Michael Cerveris read Nathan Englander’s haunting “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” which held the audience riveted in silence for something close to half an hour.
Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer had mentioned in his opening remarks that McCann had needed some persuading to commit to the evening, as he’d really been meaning to take time off from all the extracurricular aspects of the literary world and just sit down and write for several months. But I know the audience was grateful that he decided to spend one more night sharing three amazing stories with a few hundred of us—many of whom, as the photo above suggests, were eager to thank him directly afterward.
9 December 2010 | events |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
