Category: being in public

A reading in Austin, Texas

I’ll be reading from my novel on Thursday, September 26, at 7pm on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The reading will be free and open to the public, and it will take place in the Joynes Reading Room, which is on the east side of the Carothers Residence Hall, 2501 Whitis Avenue. (The Facebook event page is here.)

Please note that copies of my novel will NOT be available for sale at this reading, because of university regulations, but feel free to bring one if you’d like it signed. You might be able to pick up a copy at the Austin bookstore Book People on the way into town (apparently they have five copies in stock as of Monday morning).

Readings this weekend in DC and Brooklyn

I’m reading from my novel twice this weekend—on Saturday in Washington, DC, and on Sunday in Brooklyn.

On Saturday, September 21, at 3:30pm, I’ll be reading at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, with Anne Sward.

Thanks to the transporting power of a locomotive, I’ll be reading in Brooklyn, NY, the very next day, Sunday, September 22, at 11am, as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival. I’m on a panel of debut novelists, which will meet in Borough Hall Courtroom, 209 Joralemon Street.

Please come!

“Necessary Errors,” the book trailer

Penguin invited Brian Spinks, the co-creator of Wired magazine’s Codefellas series, to devise an animated book trailer for Necessary Errors. I think it’s kind of ingenious.

Tonight (Monday) at 7pm, I’ll be reading from the novel and having a conversation about it with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St., New York. Please come by!

A review, two interviews, an essay, and a meme

Lauren Christensen, writing for Vanity Fair’s VF Daily, has noticed parallels between Necessary Errors and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and argues that the center of both books is in “the psychological events of each well-crafted character.”

In Actuary Lit, I am interviewed by Evan Bryson, who has read a lot of my old writing and is correspondingly dangerous. He asked about the differences between the novella “Sweet Grafton” and the novel Necessary Errors, and we talked about Spark, Isherwood, Sontag, Hollinghurst, and Fitzgerald.

For the Paris Review Daily, Anna Altman has asked me about D. W. Winnicott, L. P. Hartley, and the function of the precinct in TV shows.

I’ve written a guest essay for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program about whether the critical half of one’s brain is at risk of eating the creative half.

And my novel’s place in literary history is secure now that Maris Kreizman has mash-upped it into a meme for her site Slaughterhouse 90210.