InDigest 1207 Tonight!!! (line-up change too)

Hey everyone,
Quick note for you. InDigest 1207 is tonight at 6:30pm. It's free as always and will feature John Wray and Ronaldo V. Wilson. Marlon James has had some traveling issues and is going to be unable to attend tonight. But, in his place, we will have Akhil Sharma. Wow. It's going to be a great night. Sorry to anyone hoping to see Marlon. I promise he'll be joining us for a 1207 in the near future.
Much love,
David and Dustin

1207 is Going to Rock Faces in the Fall

If you haven't been over to the 1207 events page in a little while you probably didn't know that we've added a whole bunch of new readings to the series. Damn. The fall is looking good. In August we have John Wray (author of Lowboy),Marlon James (author of The Book of Night Women),and Ronaldo V. Wilson (author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man).In September we just added Neil Smith (author of Bang Crunch| read review in Bedside Stacks), and Franz Nicolay (of The Hold Steady & his solo project Major General).October we're bringing in JC Hallman (author of The Hospital for Bad Poets).And in November we have James Hannaham whose book God Says Nowas just released through McSweeneys. Damn.

What We've Been Reading

Dustin:
I'm just finishing up Lowboyby John Wray (who is reading at the August 1207). I happened to be discussing books of this type with Geoff Herbach recently and it occurred to me (I was just starting the book then) that Wray has an extraordinary ability to make incredibly flawed characters but show them authorial love. The book is partially from the POV of a mentally ill teenager, but Wray handles these characters so well that it everything feels very real and vital. It feels like a book about the times not a book about a mentally ill person because he does it right.

David:
My pick this time around is an older book. The Meadowby the poet James Galvin was recommended to me by another great poet, Rick Barot. We were discussing nonfiction and I threw into the discussion Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground by Charles Bowden. Rick responded with The Meadow, a meditative masterpiece on the history of a piece of land on the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who occupy it.

Ashleigh:
I'm just about to finish the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus. The drawings are just okay, but the story and characters are compelling. It's been on my to-read list since seventh grade; I wish I'd gotten around to it sooner.

Jess:
Airships by Barry Hannah.Short story collection about the South (mostly white men in the South) post Civil War and through the 1970's or so. Many of these are only three or four pages long. Denis Jonson was obviously influenced by the language when he wrote Jesus' Son. Language like I wove a piece of cloth from a piece of lightning, buried it, dug it up half-wizened but still flickering, starched it and made a lamp shade. Wouldn't it feel shitty if I turned on the lamp? And then kept telling you about how I lost my wife?

Reina:
I've been very, very slowly making my way through Belovedby Toni Morrison while also reading a book on mother-daughter relationships.

Thanks for Coming, So Nice to Meet You

Thanks to everyone who came down to (Le) Poisson Rouge on Wednesday for our July 1207 reading. It was a great time, and we liked hanging out with you.

In case you really hate fun, and didn't come, but now wish you did here's what you missed:

Paul Gregory Himmelein read from a novel in progress that only utilizes language found in two different 18th century dictionaries. He read from, as his influential text, one of these dictionaries titled The Vulgar Tongue.

Geoff Herbach read from his hysterical and tragic novel The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg.He also read a couple of poems by John Berryman which made me immediately go home and start reading The Dream Songsagain.

If you missed all the fun join us on August 5th for 1207 w/ John Wray, Marlon James, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

Updated lineups for InDigest 1207

We've added some new readers to our lineups for the upcoming InDigest 1207 readings. I'm listing them below. Also, you should check out our new event pages at lepoissonrouge.com, they're pretty slick - photos, videos, and on and on.

June 1207:
Rodrigo Toscano
Angela Ball
Stephen Burt
Giao Buu

August 1207:
John Wray
Marlon James
Ronaldo V. Wilson

Hope you can come out and have some drinks with us, and enjoy some fantastic authors.