Four years ago, Nell Zink wrote an email to Jonathan Franzen. Franzen responded, and soon they found themselves enthralled with a long distance email correspondence. Franzen is the reason Nell Zink is at McNally Jackson Books releasing her debut novel. He convinced her to turn her writings into a manuscript, The Wallcreepers, and to try and have it published.
Dolan Morgan launched his debut collection of short stories That’s When the Knives Come Down at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Joining him were B.C. Edwards and Chelsea Hodson. He gave out plastic knives to the crowd–a nod to the title of the collection–and brought with him vodka infused with the pages of his novel.
People aren’t often taught how to deal with failure. Even watching interviews with famous people chat about missteps doesn’t seem to hit home because we never saw that part. Their disappointments seem cute as opposed to career questioning. For writers, failure is most evident on stage. Unlike piles of rejection slips one can stuff in a draw, light on fire, or scrapbook, in front of a crowd, a person has to respond. They must get comfortable with silence or deal with too much noise. This too is true of comedians and is why I sometimes pretend I’m a standup comic rather than a poet. Although maybe it’s because comics are the more socially acceptable of the low-paid artists. If you tell someone you’re a poet, they look confused; say you’re a comic, they fervently discuss Louis CK. Of course, a poet bombing looks rather different than a comic, but that image is fun to examine, and it still explores ideas of failure and heckling that are necessary for any artist.
Matthew Thomas read from his debut novel We Are Not Ourselves, an family novel based around Irish immigrants in New York City, at BookCourt in Brooklyn. Thomas was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens, but he says his grandmother lived in an apartment in Brooklyn not far from BookCourt until the 1990s. Then she paid, he estimated, a mere $170 a month. In college at the time, he had begged his family to hold onto the apartment. Now he figures the apartment is probably closer to $4,000. “Brooklyn is so different in general,” he muses.
WORD Bookstore hosted Amy Sohn to talk about her latest novel, The Actress, (July 2014), with Choire Sicha, co-proprietor of The Awl. Sohn provided pierogies from a neighborhood restaurant and Sicha set the mood as casual, insisting members of the audience should call out questions or comments they pair could answer or refute.
As I sit to write this review, I’d rather be finishing the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I’ve done little else for the last few weeks, as I just began reading the 3,500-page, six-volume novel following the media attention of the third volume’s English publication.
At a time when the independent bookstore has been under scrutiny—Julie Bosman of The New York Times, most notably, investigated whether the burgeoning rent costs would drive sellers out of Manhattan—McNally Jackson Books and Housing Works joined together to host the Second Annual Downtown Literary Festival on Sunday, April 13th. Though there were moments when the young age of the festival showed a bit (some events were simply more organized and better prepared than others), the joint McNally Jackson and Housing Works production succeeded in displaying the vibrant literary culture that still exists around Houston Street, adding, in its own way, to the recent trend of criticism and analyses that has centered on Manhattan as the “Writer Mecca” of the United States.
Twelve and a half years and seven thousand pages later, Akhil Sharma’s second novel, Family Life, has been released to rave reviews from places like The New York Times. George Packer, staff writer at the The New Yorker joined Sharma at the Center for Fiction to discuss the novel, a fictionalized, semi-autobiographical account of Sharma’s early life.