Authors, we encounter authors

On Friday I went to see Anne Enright read at the KGB Bar in the East
Village. Enright is a short, wry woman who interjected her reading of
an excerpt from her latest novel THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ with eyebrow
raises and "oh dear"s, which was very charming. The bar phone rang
several times during her reading and she made a joke about how
impossible it would be to read in the pauses between rings (where was
the bartender? Why was there a phone there in the first pace? Who ever
knows) I dislike using the adjective "earthy" because in most contexts
I find it lacks meaning, but as her narrator cursed, so did Enright,
without decorous pause.

On Saturday I went to see an author who first became known ("famous"
is a bit of a stretch) as a character in someone else's book. In
Christopher McDougall's BORN TO RUN Scott Jurek is just one of a
handful of Americans who travel to Mexico to compete in a foot race
against members of the Tarahumara tribe, who run insanely long
distances in the desert in sandals made out of old tires. McDougall's
book is more fad than fantastic (Peter Sarsgaard liked it so much he's
directing the movie version) but has brought to Jurek, a physical
therapist by trade, kind of a cult status. His event this week,
unfortunately, was overshadowed by the death of another character in
BORN TO RUN, a man who went for a run and never came back. (Because
there hasn't been an autopsy, there isn't much to say besides what a
shame it is.) So while Jurek was primed to talk about his new book EAT
AND RUN, about nutrition on some kind of macro level I didn't
completely follow, he was eased away from that by the restless
audience, most of whom were in some kind of running gear.

NYC: A recommendation, and a caveat

Anne Enright is reading at KGB Bar tomorrow; her book THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ was one of my favorite books of last year and I'm hoping to catch her this time around. She's reading in a series sponsored by the NYU MFA program, just like the Chad Harbach reading I went to last week.

I hadn't realized when I arrived that some of the MFA students would be reading before the main event, as opening bands to the headliner, but it didn't bother me. Two of them were very good, including one woman whose novel excerpt made me wish I had taken her name down, and one was all right. The fourth student reader aired out a poem dedicated to a poet who had recently visited his class for a guest lecture, the first line of which was: "Meghan O'Rourke equals hot." Forget tying sonnets to trees; apparently it's now too much to ask for a decent analogy in the first line of a poem. Suddenly being alone forever doesn't seem so bad!

But my point is, public-service announcement, if you are student-reading averse for whatever reason, don't get there too early; and if you can't get out of work in time, you might not be too late.

Steal from the best!

Kirkus Reviews' best of 2011 fiction list included (I assume it will be removed soon?) the plagiarized thriller ASSASSIN OF SECRETS. (Excited for the inclusion of THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ, though.)