InDigest 1207 Tonight

It's that time of the month again. Oh yes, it's time for the InDigest 1207 Reading Series. Tonight we are proud to present J.C. Hallman (The Hospital for Bad Poets [Milkweed]), Paul Harding (Tinkers [Bellvue Press]) and Dana Rossi.

The reading will be happening at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York (158 Bleecker St. between Sullivan and Thompson). All readings start at 7 with happy hour starting at 6. That's right, happy hour. Be there at 6. Book by reading authors will be available at the reading as will authors for the signing of artifacts.

J.C. Hallman grew up in Southern California. He is the author of The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, and The Hospital for Bad Poets. A book about modern utopias, In Eutopia, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in Spring 2010.

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and The University of Iowa. He lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.

Dana Rossi is a freelance writer and stage manager. She has written for Time Out New York, Broken Pencil, New York Press, and a couple of websites here and there. She recently won a New York Press Association Award for a feature article she did on actors understudying celebs on Broadway. Her blog is Party in the Back and it compares current events, trends, and news to 80s movies. On the theater side, she has most recently stage managed at Manhattan Theatre Source and at Soho Playhouse in the NYC Fringe Festival and Encore Series (where she also sound designed her first show). When she's not stage managing, writing articles, or comparing the state of the economy to Back to the Future Part II, she works as a story analyst for Sony Pictures Television

What We've Been Reading

Brad:
I'm currently reading Popular Music from Vittulaby Mikael Niemi. Niemi is a Swedish novelist who grew up within the Arctic Circle, in northern Sweden near the Finnish border. The novel takes place in the small town of Pajala (where Niemi himself grew up), with Matthias (as a grown-up) writing in his journal about his youth. It's a strange, eloquent book, with splashes of magical realism as Matthias and his friends slowly encounter Elvis, girls, and lots and lots of snow. I'm not very far along in it yet, but it's proving to be difficult to put down, and once I've done that, difficult to shake its warm hold.

Dustin:
I just foraged through Paul Harding's Tinkers.(Full Disclosure: I read this a couple weeks ago and I'm writing about it now because, not coincidentally, Paul Harding is reading at InDigest 1207 on Wednesday Oct. 7.) Tinkers concerns is two occasionally converging stories: An old man on his death bed looking back at his childhood, and the story of his epileptic tinker father and the battles that each encountered as their life paths ran in parallel and forked. The language flowers into beautiful labyrinths of digressions and descriptions. It reads almost like a work of modernist existentialism but is ultimately more pointed than that. It's complex and beautiful, one of the more demanding and satisfying works I've read in a while.

Paul Harding added to October 1207 Reading

Paul Harding, author of Tinkers, will be joining JC Hallman and Dana Rossi for the Oct. 7 InDigest 1207 Reading Series at (le) Poisson Rouge.

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and The University of Iowa. He lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.