From the inbox:

Brookline Booksmith is pleased to announce that broadcasting legend Barbara Walters will be appearing at your favorite local independent bookstore on Thursday, May 22nd at 7pm.

She will be signing copies of her best-selling book Audition from 7-9pm.

If you would like to attend the signing, copies of Audition must be purchased through the Brookline Booksmith.Your Booksmith receipt for the purchase of the book is your ticket to the signing line.

This is a book signing only. Barbara will be only signing copies of her new book. In the interest of time, no photos or personalizations will be allowed. For any further questions, please all the Booksmith at 617-566-6660. If you are unable to make the signing, but would still like a signed copy, place an order with us today for no extra charge by calling the store at 617-566-6660.

 GO TEAM BARBARA! Her memoirs are so much dishier than the whole Al divorce and nip-tuck surgery. We mean, really.

The Harvard Book Store has some lovely events and readings scheduled for early June -- the main one we're excited about is David Sedaris on June 6, though we just found out it was sold out! Oi. Obvs the HBS would have hosted the former Christmas elf at a larger venue -- like, say, the Orpheum?!? -- but due to the literary rock star's contractual obligations he can only read from his new book of pseduo-memoirish stories, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, in small locations. Lucky ticket holders are in for an intimate and exciting event. We are exceedingly jealous and, as usual, scold ourselves for not being more timely with the ticket-buying. Whenever we read essays about things like how his mom gave him cigarettes in his Easter basket in The New Yorker, the voice inside our head actually reads them IN SEDARIS'S VOICE, which sounds like a talking baby kitten on speed. We heart him so. And yet! The HBS understands our needs and yours. We've been told:

However, we will have an audio feed for folks outside, and anyone wishing to wait can have their books signed by Mr. Sedaris after the ticket-holding folks inside the store are taken care of. Anyone who was unable to purchase a ticket is welcome to join the signing line outside of the store on the night of the event. We will have an audio feed for these folks, and we hope to have video as well. Once the audience inside has had its books signed, we'll let the patient people into the store from the signing line outside. 

It's worth noting that tickets ARE still available for Lewis Black (Me of Little Faith) on June 7 at the First Parish Church, as well as our beloved Andre Dubus III (The Garden of Last Days) on June 9 at the Brattle. Not to mention Barbara Ehrenreich's  discussion of her latest tome, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation. Tickets for that go on sale June 9, so begin with the mental-planning...now!

“The world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, because man keeps saying to nature, Hey, our whole idea of a cozy future is to have jobs. That’s all we’ve got planned. What’s more, we will pursue this aim at any cost, even, paradoxically, if it means the eventual destruction of our workplace. Man says, Sacrifice industry and economy and jobs? For what? Future generations? I don’t even know those guys! I’ll tell you something for free ― it makes me ashamed that our species, which is so finely ennobled by its sacrifices, winds up sacrificing it all for the wrong things and comes off looking like a race of people who like to use their hair dryer while taking a bath . . . Yes, the truth of the matter is there has yet to be a great democratic nation because there has yet to be a great bunch of people.”

So runs a sample from Steve Toltz’s debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole, which, from the excerpts I’ve read, is galloping, ranty, colorful. It’s also, according to some background materials, a dysfunctional family story, a funny-serious take-down of media and politics, a delve into the human psyche, and an articulation of “the near-impossibility of living sincerely amidst other people.” For more of a taste, watch a haunting little video on Toltz’s Australian publisher’s web site.

Comparisons to the Pessls and Shteyngarts and Safran Foers have started (don’t hold it against him?). And the backstory to the writing sounds like a novel itself ― the Australian Toltz wrote the novel while living in Europe, above acrobats in Barcelona, sharing a studio in Paris, and the book arrived on an editor’s desk wholly unsolicited.

Toltz reads from A Fraction of the Whole this coming Presidents’ Day, Monday, February 18, at 7 pm at Brookline Booksmith.   

Thanks to Brookline Booksmith for hosting the Nick Hornby reading

Just to make sure, we decided to wait until the Curse of the Hornbino had been demolished by Your 2007 Boston Red Sox before posting the rest of Nick Hornby's Q&A at the Devotion School in Brookline, where the patron saint of record-store geeks and football obsessives appeared last week to read from his so-called young-adult novel Slam, about a Tony Hawk-worshipping teenager named Sam who flees his hometown after knocking up his girlfriend. In the video above, Hornby discusses the Farrelly Bros adaptation of Fever Pitch, his relationship with Tony Hawk, the cultural significance of skateboarding, and why Slam indulges in a bit of teenage time traveling. Enjoy.

Previously
BOSTONPHOENIX: Brit Wits: As Nick Hornby and Irvine Welsh face 50, two of Brit Lit’s standard-bearers stare down middle age in very different ways.

If our posting schedule seems irregular in the next week or so, it's because we're really busy listening to "Save Ginny Weasley" on repeat and blushing over novel-length Harry Potter fan fiction that involves...naughtiness:

"Please stay."

Heavy breathing. Then a sigh. "Why would I stay, Potter? I'm sweaty, I'm filthy, and we have classes tomorrow."

"We could just... lie here for a while. I don't want to get up. I want..." ...to hold you.

"Well, you can do whatever you want. I'm going, though."

"No! Please, Mal... Draco, just stay here for a bit."

A sneer. "God, Potter, you sound pathetic." Something soft in his cool, grey eyes. "Fine, alright, I'm staying. But not the whole night."

Yowsa!

Having taken meticulous notes and planned the novel during his cross-country travels, JACK KEROUAC wrote the first draft of On the Road in a three-week burst of creativity, taping sheets of paper together so they could run through his typewriter uninterrupted. After a cross-country exhibition tour, the original scroll has returned to Lowell’s Boott Cotton Mills Museum, where its display will be part of "ON THE ROAD IN LOWELL,” a festival of readings, musical performances, and art exhibits (see www.ontheroadinlowell.org) planned around the 50th anniversary of On the Road. The Beat Generation is reborn at Lowell National Historical Park, 115 John St, Lowell | June 15–September 14 [reception June 15: 6-9 pm] | 978.970.5000.

The Nature of Photographs is stuffed with gorgeous prints, from classic images to contemporary pieces and found negatives, not to mention a smattering of work by STEPHEN SHORE, the book’s author and a pioneer in the field of color photography. Nature isn’t merely an collection of iconic pics, it’s a primer on the key elements that make a photograph work. In an event sponsored by the Photographic Resource Center, Shore will discuss the subtext behind his images and sign copies this Thursday at Boston University’s College of General Studies, Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, 871 Comm Ave, Boston | 7 pm | free | 617.975.0600.

Texas State Fair, Dallas, 1964 by Garry Winogrand

Friday night, March 16, Grub Street hosts one of their "Grub Gone . . ." parties. Tomorrow evening's theme: Grub Gone Silly. Besides being boozey affairs (free beer for anyone who brings a book to contribute to the Grub library!), the parties involve a few quick readings. Jonathan Ames, Kris Frieswick, and Leslie Talbot bring on the guffaws for this installment. Anita Suhanin sings, and Alarm Clock Theater does some acting. Party starts at 7; readings start around 8; and the beer flows all night. Tickets are $8 ($5 for members) and you should grab them here fast.

"Read late Amis -- maniacally alert, secular in timbre but religious in the fidelity of his observations -- and stay on your toes," writes James Parker in reference to Martin Amis's latest novel, House of Meetings, set in the deep, dark of Stalin's Russia. Amis came to Cambridge to read from the book, with our own Peter Kadzis giving the introduction. Click below to hear Amis's Brattle Theatre reading.

Download

In his introduction to Paul Auster's reading at the Brattle Theatre last night, poet and Phoenix contributor William Corbett compares Auster's lastest novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, to an episode of the Twilight Zone. In the opening of the book, Mr. Blank finds himself in an empty room, and begins to be interrogated by people, people who turn out to be characters he's created. Click on the download link, below, to listen to Auster read.

LISTEN: Paul Auster, January 30 at the Brattle Theatre
download

Sam Rosen stumbled across the Paper Cut Zine Library in Harvard Square earlier this fall because he was at a "speed friending" event in a neighboring room. "We were like 'whoa, what's this place about?'" he says. And so began his love for zines. He's a librarian at the Mount Auburn Street spot now ("anyone can be a librarian," he says), and he's organized one of the library's monthly benefits taking place this Sunday at 6 pm.

The Paper Cut has gotten in some trouble in the past for hosting too-loud shows. "Punk shows, mostly," says Sam. "Because it was punk, it got rowdy." Last month's was folk-acoustic, and this weekend, it'll be experimental-electronic music, with Kris Thompson (ethereal theremin), Encanti (seriously out there IDM), Cars and Trains (mandolins, glockenspiels), and Poltergeist Friction (said to give strange dreams). It's a $5 cover. And they'll be keeping it "as loud as a high school biology lab video." Yes.

The librarians are working on alphabetizing the extensive, growing collection of zines. And Sam's working on creating his own. It's called Magical Thinking, and based on his experiences: "everything from drinking 40's in Pete's bathroom to my funniest childhood memories, and this adventure I had with a friend where we found a boat at three in the morning near the Cambridgeside Galleria and hopped on it and went down the Charles. Zines can be anything."

The benefit is meant to raise a little money, but more so, raise awareness that the spot exists. It's at 45 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge. Call 617.492.2606.

Cynthia von Buhler has lead many lives: in Boston she fronted the S&M-themed musical review Women of Sodom; ran a gallery out of the Allston home she dubbed Castle von Buhler; and created such unforgettable works as the Cynth-O-Matic, a vending machine that dispensed, among other things, vials of her own pubic hair. An award-winning illustrator for her paintings, which were often done in the style of old masters, she also sent out publicity stills in which her shirt read, “Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck.” But her latest incarnation might be the strangest twist yet: now an established children’s author, she’s released a sweet book called The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside. Still, that didn’t stop her from recording an accompanying song that milks one particular double-entendre for all its worth. In advance of her reading and signing tomorrow at 3 pm at Diskovery in Brighton, we talked with von Buhler as she was installing one of her 3-D sets from the book in the Museum of American Illustration in New York City.

How did you go from the sort of cutting edge art and performance stuff you do to kids’ books? What was the transition like?

People don’t actually realize that I’ve been doing this the whole time. Before I was doing any performance or music, my major was children’s books. So I have been doing illustrations for magazines, and painting, and sculpture, all at the same time that I was going off on this other tangent doing music and performance art. And I still do performance art as well. Even meeting with children serves as performance art in itself.

Is there one method or mode of art and/or performance art that you feel more comfortable with? Or is it good to go back and forth?

To me, it’s all visual art. I would get bored if I was doing one or the other. I’m very comfortable doing children’s books and doing illustrations and working with my hands and creating things. I’m very comfortable with that. I’m not as comfortable with singing.

Is having an audience made up of kids more difficult than having grown-ups watching you?

Or like fetish people? (Laughs). Is it different? I guess so. It’s different, but it is an audience.

Different how?

I think that these are kids you are forming. You meet with these kids in school and you have a big impression on them. I think older people are kind of set in their ways in terms of what they like and what they do.

Someone around here mentioned that you’d been a cat-book convention recently. I’ve gotta be honest and say I picture a lot of old ladies in cat sweatshirts. I’d love to hear how that was, how you fit in.

It was actually very fun. I went out to California to do some book signings and workshops, and there’s something called the Cat Writer’s association, and it’s sort of like . . . have you ever been to a Star Trek convention? Well it’s kind of like the female counterpart to the Star Trek convention. The women, they’re a little bit older — in their 40s, 50s, 60s — and it was really great to hang out with older women and just talk about our love of cats and people who rescue cats. There were a lot of people wearing cat T-shirts and cat paraphernalia and clothing which was a tacky, but yeah, very nice people, just like at the Star Trek conventions, ‘cause I used to like to go to those. You know, it’s people who are really into something in that obsessive kind of way.

Cynthia von Buhler signs The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside with Phoenix contributor and author Clea Simon, Saturday, December 9, from 3 to 6 pm at Diskovery, 569 Washington Street, Brighton, 617.787.2640

In between trying really hard not to nod off (whoever cranked up the heat at the Brattle, heads up -- it was hella sweaty in there), we took a general sense of great pleasure in sitting in a big room full of New Yorker dorks last night. Ah, NYer-heads are a great breed. The jolly Matthew Diffee, Drew Dernavich, Eric Lewis, and we <3 him long-time Phoenix cartoonist David Sipress were on hand to showcase the cream of their crap. (And make poop jokes.)

They answered lots of questions during an ongoing Q&A session:

Q: How do you know when Bob Mankoff likes your stuff?
A: If he spends more than two seconds looking at it. Literally.

Q: How do you get your cartoons into the magazine (basically a cloaked version of the real question: Why The Fug are my Cartoons Still Sitting in the Slush Pile of Doom?!!!!!11)
Answer: The New Yorker is very particular. Keep trying! <evil laughter>

They showed us witty slides of what The New Yorker's Cartoon Bank should sell (Cartoon casket liners, artificial hearts, etc. etc). They made more poop jokes. They screened an INSANE video made by Mankoff that ended in him dying from a rejected liver transplant. That man adores being a grump.

They did some ridic improv cartoon drawing (Jews against Christians -- their idea) which involved pigs, lawyers, and shopping gurus.

Oh, and they presented us with the best of their rejected cartoons, which you will not, at any point, be seeing in The Magazine. Weeee!

 We have to go turn 40 years old now. Later younguns.

Aside from the Steve Almond/James Joyce dirty business at Great Scott that Nina will be attending (and we can't wait to hear what she thinks of Almond's recitation), here are four more options for your Wednesday. Two of them are naughty omg!

How did Tom Brady go from being a sixth-round draft pick to the Patriots’ star quarterback and one of football’s most celebrated players? Ah, the warm-fuzzy story of the underdog. Sports journalist, former Phoenix staffer, and NPR contributor CHARLES P. PIERCE tells the tale in Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything, and he reads (did we mention that he’s a totally funny guy?) at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | 7:30 pm | free | 617.244.6619.

Sure, sad little electronica musicians cum pseudo-social-justice bloggers (we’re looking at you, Moby) sometimes think they know how to inspire change through the written word, but the “AMERICAN PROTEST LITERATURE” panelists actually do. British author ZOE TRODD discusses her American Protest Literature (leave it to the Brits to know us better than we know ourselves), TIMOTHY PATRICK MCCARTHY reads Eugene V. Debs’s Statement to the Court, JOHN STAUFFER presents the images and photos that have altered public opinion, and playwright DORIC WILSON discusses excerpts from his Street Theatre. Cause a stir at the Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington St, Boston | 6:30 pm | free | 617.428.6439.

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Elaine doesn’t get the joke in a New Yorker cartoon and asks an editor and he doesn’t get it either? Could the ones they turned down have been better? A 90 percent rejection rate of submissions (even for regulars) prompted contributor Matthew Diffee to salvage lost gems scribbled by the mag’s top 30 cartoonists in The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker. He’ll present them as part of a live comedy show with colleagues Drew Dernavich, David Sipress, and Eric Lewis at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | 7:30 pm | $15 | 617.876.6387. (We'll be there, probably not in the front row because there are rumors of audience participation and we tend to have a blushing problem. Report tk next week!)

Last but not least, the superfresh Boston Phoenix Author Series continues with GEORGE PROCHNIK's Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. In other words? More sex talk. Lots of it. The reading, signing, and reception is at the Burren, 247 Elm St, Somerville | 6:30 pm | free | 617.776.6896.

In letters to his wife Nora, James Joyce addresses her as “my naughty little fuckbird,” “my little cuntie,” and “my sweet little dirty farter.” And that’s the G-rated stuff. Tomorrow night, Steve Almond (who else?) leads a reading of Joyce’s filthy letters with a team of local writers and musicians; Hallelujah the Hills frontman Ryan Walsh, Hands and Knees, and the Juliet Kilo provide musical interludes to the literary raunch. That's at Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, in Allston.

From the inbox:

Quick Fiction, a magazine of tiny stories, releases its tenth issue in style on Thursday, November 9 at the Enormous Room in Cambridge at 7 pm. Dubbing the event "Double-Digit Debacle," the magazine celebrates five strong years in publishing with a release party featuring readings by Quick Fiction authors James Grinwis, Amy L. Clark, and Michael Thurston.

Previously: Quick Ficiton: Doing Good
Also: http://quickfiction.org/

Should you two be standing in front of a Muggle house in your robes?

Oh, that Hunter S. Thompson. What a card!

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat," quoth Edgar Allan Poe.

If that didn't scare you, just look at the sneers on these two. Happy Halloween from TomKat and their little angel alien!

If you know JULIA SWEENEY only from her Saturday Night Live running one-joke androgynous character sketch “Pat,” or her incredible This American Life contribution, this is your chance to catch up. Sweeney’s one-woman show God Said, Ha! — about how she and her brother Michael were diagnosed with cancer within months of each other (Michael did not survive) — won critical raves for its mix of humor and pathos and was turned into a film by Quentin Tarantino and a Grammy-winning CD. Her new Letting Go of God is about this lapsed Irish Catholic’s spiritual quest during and following those events. The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard is presenting Sweeney and her show for one night only preceding a film release, CD, and national tour, at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy St, Cambridge | 8 pm | $19; $12 students | 617.496.2222.

Check out a video of her performance here.

It was a dreadful night for a number of reasons.

One would think that 800 individuals who gather in a high school auditorium in Natick to listen to, or perhaps even, celebrate, a story of three orphans whose parents perished in a suspicious fire and who had to live out their days of innocence being pursued by the most devious of men, deserve such punishment. But if you had witnessed the scene of terror in Natick on Monday night, in which fans of the Series of Unfortunate Events book series — children and adults and high school students and college hipsters and hipsters in training and four men with beards and a woman with a broken foot — came to meet Mr. Lemony Snicket and listen to a performance of the Gothic Archies, you would not come to that conclusion.

First, and most obvious, was the blaring absence of Mr. Snicket himself. When the Gothic Archies took the stage, the trio was only duo, with Stephin Merrit (he of the Magnetic Fields) holding his Ukele, an empty chair surrounded by percussion equipment meant to be played by Mr. Snicket, and someone named Daniel Handler on accordion.

When the announcer announced Mr. Snicket’s name, both musicians looked stage right, and saw nothing.

Handler, close-cropped hair and too-small suit, tried to “call” Mr. Snicket (I use “call” in “quotes,” since the “phone” he was “using” looked to be comprised of two carved wooden blocks connected with a string.) After Handler got the run-around with an operator (or at least that’s what he told us), he walked into the audience, took a book out of a child’s hand and began to excoriate about the saga of the Baudelaire orphans.

He went back up on the stage, and the duo played selections from The Tragic Treasury: Music for "A Series of Unfortunate Events", which compiles the theme songs the Gothic Archies wrote for each of the 13 volumes of Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events" series.

The lack of percussion made the arrangements sound downright ghastly. Handler attempted to fill the void with some uninspired vocal percussion, but it was not the same. The word “rip-off” kept floating through my mind, but since the event was free, a money-back guarantee was not in the cards. This was rather a different kind of rip-off — a rip-off the soul, as you will never be able to recover from seeing the looks on the children’s faces who walked all night to Natick to see their hero, only to be devastated by his absence. Yes, the crowd laughed heartily at Mr. handler’s sardonic antics. But it was a nervous laughter. A laughter that sensed something dangerous was just around the bend, and you might as well laugh now, because you’ll may never get the opportunity to laugh ever again, for the rest of your life.

After Mr. Handler offended Mr. Merrit’s musical ability, causing Mr. Merrit to walk off the stage in a sad, sad huff, Handler then plucked two horrified children from the audience to provide percussion. They were utterly inept and only added to the pain of the night.

Mr. Handler then apologized again for Mr. Snicket’s absence, and said he would sign everyone’s book with a “stamp” of Snicket’s autograph after the performance. (Though such a gesture seemed utterly ridiculous, hundreds of fans of the books would sit in the auditorium until well after midnight to meet with Mr. Handler and get this “signature.”)

Mr. Handler ended the performance with the sea chantey “Scream and Run Away,” which features the advice that if you ever encounter the devious Count Olaf, you should “run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run or die, die, die die die die die die.” Mr. Handler implored the audience to stomp our feet when he said “run,” and slump down and “play dead,” when he said “die.” The latter task was not too difficult to perform, as many in the audience already felt that a little part of them had died.

-Bill Jensen, Guest Blogging

Don't be jealous!

Why. Does. She. Have. SOMUCHFUCKINGHAIR?!

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
We’re tearing through NELL FREUDENBERGER’s debut novel, The Dissident, at a crazy pace, pausing only to marvel at how this white, Harvard educated, ex-New Yorker editorial assistant managed to capture the voice of Yuan Zhao, a Chinese performance artist and political firecracker spending a year in Los Angeles teaching at the St. Anselm’s School for Girls. Alternating with his narrative is a third-person POV that circles around the dysfunctional Traverses, the family hosting the Yuan’s stay. Gawker may have slammed Freudenberger for inspiring the ire of the literary world when her gorgeous face helped make her award-winning short story collection, Lucky Girls, even more palatable to the industry, but her good looks have nothing to do with the fact that she’s one of the most compelling young voices around. She’ll read at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | Oct 77 @ 6 pm | $3 | 800.542.READ. If you miss Nell tomorrow, you can haul it over to Newtonville books and see her on Wednesday 18 @ 7:30 pm for free.

A BLUE-EYED BEAUTY
Yes, Baby Suri lives, except by our calculations she looks about a year older than she’s supposed to be. In fact, we’re convinced Mr. and Mrs. Cruisazy bought her — there’s got to be a Scientology-approved baby-black market squirreled away somewhere. Celeb photog ANNIE LIEBOVITZ was the lucky lady to snap TomKat in all their domestic bliss, and her A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 is packed with provocative portraits (a fetal and stripped John Lennon wrapped around Yoko, a naked and knocked-up Demi Moore) culled from her career at Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Famous people really enjoy being naked and with child, don’t they? Someone please ask if Suri’s was wearing a tot-toupee when Liebovitz speaks at the Coolidge Corner Theatre | Oct 17 @ 6 pm | 290 Harvard St, Brookline | $2 | 617.566.6660.

Just make it happen.

The Old North Bridge

Walden Pond

The Old Manse
(Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived here)

Why has no one informed us of the fact that Concord, MA is gorgeous? Lucky for you scribes and literary folk with a car and gas money, The Concord Festival of Authors begins next week on Thurs, Oct 19 and will run through Fri, Nov 3. Over 40 authors will be reading at various bookstores, libraries, and other venues in and around the Concord area. Too many to list here, in fact, so take a peek at the Concord Public Library's calendar for this year's schedule. Almost all of the readings/talks are free.

Some obvious stand-outs:

The New Literary Voices line-up on Sun, Oct 22
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Heidi Pitlor, The Birthdays
Adam Braver, Crows over the Wheatfield
Elisabeth Brink, Save Your Own
Mistress of Ceremonies: Lynda Morgenroth
Fowler Memorial Library, 1322 Main St, West Concord | 3:00 pm

The Wizard of Oz Family Party on Sun, Oct 28
There will, in fact, be people dressed up as the Lollipop Guild. Please note costumes are encouraged, not required, though you will feel extraordinarily awkward and un-Oz-like if you aren't dressed in full Tin Man or Dorothy gear. The choice is yours.
Concord Scout House, 74 Walden St, Concord | 2-4 pm

Dennis Lehane, Coronado: Stories on Wed, Nov 1
Mahoney Auditorium, UMass Lowell, South Campus | 7:30 pm

There's an amusing article over at The Foreword that poses the question of whether this sort of literary event should be considered a fundraiser. It involves a chiding phone call from Sandra Day O'Connor to organizer Rob Mitchell. Festivals like this don't make bank, and they survive mainly on the passion and commitment of their organizers, local authors and sponsors, and visiting bigger-name writers who are willing to participate. It's just...well...nice. And we're pleased to see this one has been alive and kicking for 14 years.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut House of Leaves – with its unsettling text patterns (scrunched letters, upside-down words, sentences that ran diagonal, blank pages, black pages), its unsettling narrator interaction, and, most of all its unsettling – no, terrifying -- image of an ever-expanding blackness -- ranks as one of the most psychically haunting books I’ve read. Sort of a Twin Peaksy horror show, existentionally creepy and unconventional.

Unconventional also describes Only Revolutions, his second novel, just out, which he’ll be rotating – err – reading from tonight. The book starts at both ends. It’s told by two 16 year-old lovers, Hailey and Sam, over the course of a hundred years. Lists of historic events, all suggested by readers of Danielewski’s web site, line the margins of the pages. It’s suggested that you read eight pages one way, flip the book over and around, and read eight pages the other way. I’ve done six rotations, so I’m close to fifty pages into it. And so far, it’s more Leaves of Grass than House of Leaves – exuberant, exultant, with all sorts of language acrobatics. Does the writing warrant the effort? I’m withholding judgment at the moment. But I haven’t stopped rotating yet. And I’m curious to see how Danielewski will handle it tonight, when he reads at 7 pm at the Brookline Booksmith.

Elsewhere:

Danielewski's little sister is Poe, and she made an album to accompany House of Leaves. It's called Haunted.

Fenway Recordings, Brookline Booksmith, Houghton Mifflin, and the Phoenix are teaming up to present the Phoenix Author Series, which kicks off next Saturday, September 30, at Great Scott in Allston at 7:30 pm. Southie native Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, and the forthcoming Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under, will be the first featured writer. He’ll read and sign before Read Yellow, Jake Brennan, Foreign Island, and Plan DJs take the stage as part of the NEMO Music Festival.

All Souls documented MacDonald’s childhood wrapped up in the criminal class of 1970’s Southie. Of a family of ten siblings, all raised by “Ma” alone, one of his brothers jumped off a building, a sister was pushed off a building and suffered brain damage, another brother was killed in a bank robbery, and one was hanged in a jail cell. MacDonald confronts race and poverty and violence within his family and the neighborhood.

In Easter Rising, he turns the lens towards himself and answers the question “how did you escape it all?” Turns out punk had a lot to do with it.

MacDonald, who lives in Brooklyn now, founded the South Boston Vigil Group, and helped launch Hands without Guns, a gun buyback program, in Boston.

The Four Stories reading series – you remember: four authors; one theme; the Enormous Room – starts up again this fall after a run in Osaka, Japan. Didn’t make those myself; the walk to the elephant-doored Cambridge spot was a little more convenient. The second season opens on September 11 with “A Place Apart II: Tales of Exile and Home, Family and Foreigners.” And reading under that theme will be Chris Castellani, Grub Street’s artistic director, author or The Saint of Lost Things and A Kiss from Maddalena, and all around local writing hero; Scott Heim, who wrote Mysterious Skin and the forthcoming We Disappear; Christine Palamidessi Moore, a writing teacher at BU and author of The Virgin Knows; and Lucy McCauley, whose non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Salon.com, and the Los Angeles Times. It starts at 7 pm, and it’s free.

The rest of the schedule, in brief, runs as follows:

September 25, 7 pm: “Hitting the Road: Four Stories features Post Road Writers” with Lise Haines, Richard Hoffman, Randi Triant, and Paul Yoon.

October 10, 7 pm: “Driving Solo: Four Stories presents Grub Street authors on loneliness and love unrequited” with Stace Budzko, Jamie Cat Callan, Mike Heppner, and Ellen Litman,

October 30, 7 pm: “Crime and Punishment: Stories from the Big House” (honoring PEN New England’s Freedom To Write Program), with Helen Elaine Lee, T.J. Parsell, and Jean Trounstine.

November 13, 7 pm: “Friends, Family, and Foes: Tales of the Ties that Bind” with Elisabeth Brink, Jessica Berger Gross, Tracy McArdle, and Karen Propp.

And Four Stories will be back in Japan in December and January.

"When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it. There is a kind of mysticism to writing. Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have. I enjoy the freedom of the blank page. You have to respect the mysticism of writing; you're always going to learn things that will work subconsciously and stuff that won't. You can't tear yourself apart with it either. If you become too self-conscious about it, it shows up in the work, so you've got to enjoy it as well."

A few weeks ago we gave you the heads up that Irvine Welsh would be rolling into town to promote his latest, The Bedroom Secrets of Master Chefs. Your obligatory reminder, since he's a literary supastar, and also, we'd hate for you to miss it just so you can sit home and wait for the hella anti-climactic Real World finale. He'll be at the Coolidge Corner Theatre tomorrow night at 6 pm and tix are only 2 bucks. Reserve them over the phone (617.566.6660) or buy them at the Brookline Booksmith. If you wind up going, please let us know how many f-bombs or c-words Welshy drops. And we'll let you know if Svetlana gets smacked in the face.*

*Editor's note: OMFG how could we have messed that up?! Real World is on tonight. Tomorrow night is the friggin awesome to the max premiere ep of Laguna Beach: Season 3. Welshy or Cali dramarama x 1000?!! Sigh.

Just a friendly reminder from the Word Up crew that Al Gore will be signing copies of An Inconvenient Truth at noon today at the Harvard Book Store. You want to know why it's so freaking hot out? He may tell you, if it doesn't hold up the line too much. But no pushing. You'll all get your face time in.

He's all business now. Why so serious, Al? Oh, it must be because we're killing the planet. I totally forgot because I was having a heart attack over the Carmen Electra & Dave Navarro split. Sigh.

Writers are known to spend days in self-imposed, lonely isolation. So when they decide to unwind, they do it up right. Grub Street, Word Up's fave independent writing center, is hosting Grub Gone...Sweaty, the second in a series of reading parties that are geared to get you drunk and slam-dancing to Steve Almond's DJ stylings, or at least mix and mingle a little with some other local scribes. It's July 28th, 7 pm doors, Grub Street HQ. Tickets are $5 for members; $8 non-members. And we're giving you a few week's notice to plan your outfit and get going on the first draft of your best literary pick-up lines (none of these apply), because Grubbie events do sell out. Quickly.

Readings by Stephen McCauley, Billy Giraldi, Sue Williams, Ondine Brent, and Carmen Nobel start at 8 pm -- but the alchy will be flowing all night, and the wild hip-shakin' can commence any damn time you please. Just don't do anything you'd regret to see "fictionalized" in someone's short story submission for a fall workshop class.