…at the same bookstore, but not the same location. Choose your Barnes & Noble!
Pollitt: Barnes & Noble Astor Place, 7 p.m.; her new book is Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories (Random House).
Toobin: Barnes & Noble Union Square, 7 p.m.; his new book is The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Doubleday). Slate recently did an analysis of some media perspectives on the book so far.
As for me, I’ll be at Katha’s reading; she’s a hilarious reader, and I should know—I’ve been to a dozen of ’em. Come join me! If you didn’t read her Q. and A. with Deboorah Solomon in the Times yesterday, check it out. The rest of her fall book tour schedule is here; she’s traveling throughout the country, so see if she’s got a reading or radio-show appearance near you. James Wolcott had some nice praise for Katha’s new book, Learning to Drive, on his blog yesterday: “To doubters and detractors, I would recommend the bittersweet chapter on the Marxist study group Pollitt attended in the 1990s, whose subtle intrigues and quixotic yearnings would make a wonderful play for a Richard Greenberg or A. R. Gurney.”
As always, the best way to keep up with events we think you’ll want to go to is to subscribe to the Emdashes Google Calendar. It’s free (natch) and we’re adding rashers of new events—New Yorker-related and otherwise excellent happenings—every day. We’ve also made a New Yorker Festival-specific calendar, for those of you following it, in person or in spirit. Got a listing for our calendar? Send it to listings@emdashes.com.

An event hosted by my alma mater:

A Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya
Saturday, 10/06, 5:00 PM or Sunday, October 10/07, 7:00 PM
James Chapel, Union Theological Seminary, West 120th St. and Broadway
Enjoy one of two free performances of A Requiem for Anna Politkovskaya, a giant puppet pageant created by Amy Trompetter, with choral music and speakers commemorating the one-year anniversary of the murder of the Russian journalist.
Click here for more information, or call 212-854-5638.

Martin has been continuously updating our fabulous Emdashes calendar, which can alert you to literary, art, music, theater, and other events around the country, especially New Yorker-related ones. We’ve also made one just for the New Yorker Festival that shows only festival events. Scoring tickets is up to you! Subscribe (for free) to both; you’ll be glad you did.

H. L. Mencken’s 128th birthday has come and gone (it was Wednesday). We may have missed it, but the Mencken Society has a slew of rousing events scheduled this weekend celebrating the great freethinking writer and editor. You’ve got to love a crank so cranky he published a book dedicated to criticizing himself; it was called Menckeneanea: A Schimpflexikon. (Schimpflexikon is German and means something like “dictionary of disgrace.”)
There’s a lecture on Mencken and George Jean Nathan, there’s a preview of the George H. Thompson Mencken Collection, and former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis will be speaking.
Most of the events seem to be on Saturday, September 15. You can contact the society’s president, Edward A. Martin, for more info. —Martin Schneider

This past Wednesday, realizing I didn’t have The New Yorker or anything else to read at lunchtime (even a speedy closing-week lunch is grim without reading material), I took an L magazine out of its traffic-cone-orange box on the street, and consumed it without looking up once. And marveled, as I’ve done before: This almost makes me want to stop reflexively hating twentysomethings. Here their smartass, heartless culture seems smart and heartfelt! It’s designed to be read easily and pleasurably; it’s well edited; the features are witty and relevant (check out this week’s “myface.com” profiles, which match, for instance, stoners, ardent Marxists, and proto-masters of the universe with career-rejuvenating, actual courses at local colleges to restore their washed-up dreams ten years on). There are all the venue-grouped music ads you used to pick up the Voice to tear out and save, just quite a bit smaller. (The whole magazine is hiply wee, hence its tagline, “Put it in your pocket.”) The writing is knowing, but not annoying. I’m giving this micro-generation another big chance.
That night, after work, I stopped by the Dorothy Parker birthday celebration at the Algonquin, hosted by the indefatigable Kevin Fitzpatrick, whose countless efforts in toasting and promoting her are surely making Mrs. Parker blush and grin from somewhere—finding herself, at least temporarily, without a barb to sling. (She’d recover, though.)
As Kevin reports, there was a spirited, natty crowd there, drinking expensive but excellent martinis (I would really rather not capitalize “martinis”) and, as the cake was served, singing a tuneful “Happy Birthday,” which brought appreciative smiles from the other patrons. Among them, the crowd I mean, were Jessica Weil and Brian Diedrick, with whom I started chatting about this fall’s Parkerfest. It turns out that Diedrick is a regular L contributor, oddly enough, and one of the writers who does the taxicab interviews (which list not only cabbies’ opinions on the week’s given subject—in this issue, “What Was Your Favorite Subject in School?”—but the previous profession of each) that are one of the magazine’s standout features. Further evidence, perhaps, that we are not completely doomed. Now all we need to do is solve nuclear proliferation, &c. (Incidentally, I notice there’s a critique of the recent New Yorker story “Nawabdin Electrician” by Daniyal Meenuddin on the L magazine blog; I haven’t read either yet.)
And R.I.P., Grace Paley. About ten years ago, I was taking a poetry class at the 92nd St. Y; our classroom was in the library. We were all reading something to ourselves when suddenly our concentrated silence was broken by the sound of Paley’s voice over the loudspeaker—she was reading a story in the auditorium below. Of course, we all turned one ear toward the ethereally elevated but unwavering sound, and listened till she was done.

Happy 30th birthday, Baltimore City Paper, which is also home to Emily Flake—about whom I am unreservedly enthusiastic (and there are fewer things in that category than you might imagine)—as well as Tim Kreider, whose comic has a fantastic title that I like to invoke almost daily: The Pain—When Will It End?
So Emily Flake has an event coming up on August 9 to celebrate her new book, These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate/Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit. You’d do well to go. Here are the details:
Happy Ending (upstairs lounge)
302 Broome St. (bet. Forsythe & Eldridge)
Look for the pink awning that says “Health Club”
happyendinglounge.com
August 9th, 7-9 PM

6:30 p.m., Tompkins Square Park. Here’s an outdoor, summery way to meet a book I think you shouldn’t skip—Shakespeare’s Kitchen, a new short-story collection by longtime New Yorker writer Lore Segal—and applaud a magazine (I’ve been known to step out with other magazines from time to time) that deserves applause. From the Chicago Tribune review of Shakespeare’s Kitchen: “On every page the words snap together like bright and brand-new Lego blocks. The whole is clever, original, precise. It is frankly flabbergasting.”

Here’s the event info for tomorrow.

BOMB Magazine
Wednesday, August 1, 6:30 pm, Tompkins Square Park
Featuring readings by ED PARK, LORE SEGAL, and LYNNE TILLMAN

Join the Editors of BOMB Magazine as they celebrate 26 years of publishing original poetry and fiction with a reading from their special 100th issue (can you believe it?!). With free magazine giveaways, subscription raffles, and other hijinx, you’re sure to get something out of it. Contributors include:
Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His first novel, Personal Days, will be published by Random House in 2008.
Winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, Lore Segal is the author of the novels Other People’s Houses and Her First American (both available from The New Press), and several books for children. She lives in New York City.
Lynne Tillman is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two nonfiction books. Tillman’s novel, No Lease on Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press last year.
BOMB Magazine is a not-for-profit quarterly, currently celebrating 26 years of legendary interviews between artists, writers, architects, directors, and musicians, and 32 pages of original fiction and poetry in each issue. Visit bombsite.com for interviews and essays about the arts by the people who make the arts, and to listen to recordings of BOMBLive! events.
DIRECTIONS: Take the F to 2nd Ave. Enter the park at Seventh Street between A & B. The reading will take place in the central area of the park.

Sewell Chan writes in City Room, the New York Times‘s Metro blog:

“May I say, I’ve never known such a well-behaved group of dogs at a literary reading,” Adam Gopnik, the author and New Yorker writer, said this afternoon after the novelist Cathleen Schine read from her latest book, “The New Yorkers.”
Ms. Schine’s audience was unusual: about 80 humans and about half as many dogs, who had gathered in the courtyard of the Museum of the City of New York. There were a few yelps, barks and howls, but otherwise the audience was rather subdued.
…
Mr. Gopnik, who has written about his children’s experiences in Paris and New York, compared the outlook of dogs and children. “For dogs and for children, New York is their nature, not their culture,” he said, adding: “The improbability, the impossibility of New York is never something that strikes dogs or children. To them it is simply the jungle, the forest where they live.” Cont’d.

It’s an odd coincidence in a month of odd coincidences: just yesterday, I found my copy of Schine’s terrific novel The Evolution of Jane in a box of books, and set it aside to mail to my dear young cousin Jane, herself an exceptionally evolved creature. I interviewed Schine (who is, as you surely know, the former wife of David Denby) when Evolution came out, and she was a lot of fun to talk to. Someday I’ll have more of my clips up, but it will require quite a bit of scanning stamina.