Queens Writers Represent!

This Sunday, January 22st, at 3 p.m., I’ll be hosting a literary event at the L.I.C. bar in Long Island City (45-58 Vernon Blvd., at the corner of 46th Avenue). Two writers from Astoria decided to have a reading together, and then they invited me to introduce them because I’m a local, too!

Marcy Dermansky is a MacDowell Fellow who has won the Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and the Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including McSweeneys, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Indiana Review. She is a film critic for About.com. Twins is her debut novel, but she’s not an identical twin.

Tara McCarthy wrote the memoir Been There, Haven’t Done That back in the ’90s; her recently published novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart, is about conjoined twins who are also pop stars. Tara’s work has appeared in magazines including Seventeen and Good Housekeeping, and on websites including Killing the Buddha and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Her novel for teens, The Pursuit of Happiness, is due out in March from MTV Books.

19 January 2006 | events |

Read This: The Life of Benjamin Franklin

I can’t actually say that I’ve finished J. A. Leo Lemay’s The Life of Benjamin Franklin. For one thing, only the first two volumes of the projected seven have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press yet, and I’ve only been able to dip into it in my spare time, so I’m still in the middle of the opening segment, Journalist: 1706-1730. But what I’ve read so far has been pretty amazing—no matter how cluttered you think the Franklin biography field is, or even if you’re not plugged into contemporary books on American history to care if there’s a Franklin glut, try to make time for these books on your reading schedule. (Realistically, though, you’d probably need a two-week vacation…but to me that would be a great vacation; your standards may vary.)

It’s a bit surprising to me that these two books (the second is Printer and Publisher: 1730-1747) haven’t gotten much review attention yet, especially considering that yesterday was the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth. I can’t say that’s an original observation on my part, since I only found out about the biography from Paul Collins’s Weekend Stubble blog, where he wondered, “That silence is the sound of critics quietly leafing through the volumes and taking notes for upcoming reviews…. right?” If so, they must still be busy scribbling, because so far the only paper to issue a review is the Washington Times, where even Franklin scholars acknowledge Lemay’s mastery (well, one scholar, anyway). That, and a Delaware paper mentioning last week that Franklin visited Delaware a couple of times, has been it so far. Meanwhile, Sidney Sheldon’s memoir got a full page in the New York Times Book Review. I mean, I know it takes a while to read 1,020 pages of smallish print, but heck, even I would’ve cleared out some room on my schedule if somebody had asked!

18 January 2006 | read this |