I knew that those Barnes and Noble author events were missing something, and now, thanks to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Poetry Society of America, I know what it is: beer.
Those two groups host a series of readings called Poems & Pints; the fourth installment is February 3. Appearing will be Dana Goodyear, senior editor and contributor at The New Yorker, and Matthew Zapruder, founder and editor-in-chief of Wave Books whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker.
The reading will be on Tuesday, February 3, at 6:30 pm at the Fraunces Tavern, Nichols Room, 54 Pearl Street (at Broad Street). Entry costs nothing! (Presumably the same is not true of the beers.)
—Martin Schneider

Mary Ellen Mark’s new book of photographs, “Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographs On Set,”:http://www.amazon.com/Seen-Behind-Scene-Photography/dp/0714848476/ sounds very interesting. It’s dedicated to film sets; I confess I have ample curiosity about this subject (like lots of other people). She’ll be appearing at McNally Jackson to present a slide show, sign copies of the book, and I’m sure speak or take questions. Her photos have been appearing in _The New Yorker_ for years now.
Here’s some verbiage from the press release to help assume some of the rhetorical weight of this post:

For the past 40 years, Mary Ellen Mark has been given unprecedented access to the film set of the world’s most acclaimed directors including James Ivory, Francis Ford Copolla, and Steven Soderbergh, to make beautiful, candid pictures of famous actors and actresses such as Marlon Brando, Laurence Fishburne, Nicole Kidman, Christina Ricci, and Benicio Del Toro.

This event takes place on Monday, December 1, 2008, at 7pm (“designated”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/joshua-henkin-still-elegant-so.php author appearance hour in NYC etc. etc.) at McNally Jackson, on 52 Prince Street.

I’ve expressed my enthusiasm for Joshua Henkin “before”:http://emdashes.com/2007/11/the-elegant-joshua-henkin.php. It’s a year later and I’m no closer to reading one his novels, but—he’s still on my list! He’ll be speaking at “McNally Jackson Books”:http://mcnallyjackson.com/, located at 52 Prince Street, on Tuesday, November 18, at 7pm (7pm being the designated author appearance hour in NYC). If he’s half as engaging and insightful as he is on “_The Elegant Variation_”:http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/, it’ll be memorable. (Here’s a “stretch of recent posts”:http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/09/page/4/ I hadn’t even seen yet.) So run, walk, perambulate, etc.

Emdashes favorite Mike Birbiglia, whose one-man tale of the drowsily unchaperoned, Sleepwalk With Me, has made it to Broadway, gets a swell review in the New York Times. We’ve seen it and we laughed at the funny parts, laughed at the sad parts (because Mike makes them so funny), and laughed at the parts in between. We suggest you bring your family in town for the holidays. It’ll be a heartwarming conversation-starter, and even though we’re not phrasing that very freshly, we’re not being ironic in the least. —E.G.

Jonathan Taylor writes:
I got a last-minute ticket to Monday’s sold-out “Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries” event at the New York Public Library. It’s fair to say that The Economist‘s obituaries editor, Ann Wroe, stole the show, or was smartly handed it by the NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber, on a platter of quotes from Aristophanes and Rilke. Wroe and her predecessor, Keith Kolquhoun, have edited the new Economist Book of Obituaries.
The Economist publishes just one substantial, often heroically sympathetic, appreciation a week. Wroe frequently plucks a relatively obscure figure from among the deaths covered by other papers to illuminate his or her illuminatingness, as in the case of Martin Tytell, New York City’s last typewriter “surgeon.”
However, Wroe evidently does have the latitude to commit the occasional “double-header,” in an instance such as the synchronous deaths of Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley. This obit rather belabors the obvious contrasts between the two rich women before concluding with a leveling wave of the scythe: “Both ended sadly, left alone with their dogs and the ghosts of their husbands in dust-draped city apartments or empty summer homes. But in the memory of most New Yorkers one was a saint and the other a sinner. Richesse oblige.”
Unlike newspapers like The New York Times and London’s Daily Telegraph (which, Wroe noted, specializes in “colonels” and “decadent aristocrats”), The Economist doesn’t have need for an extensive file of prewritten obits. Only seven, in fact, one of which is Saddam Hussein’s, evidently never published for whatever reason; she let slip that others include the (now former) king of Nepal, bookish former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot, and Nelson Mandela. It was not clear whether the bigger package she promised for Margaret Thatcher’s death was counted as one of these seven. Prince Philip, she said, was not among them, although she declared he wasn’t “looking too well lately” (!).
The presence in the audience of Times obit writers Bruce Weber and William Grimes, along with former public editor Daniel Okrent, steered the event toward Times protocol fetishism. For a lot of people present, I don’t think this was an idle concern, although in reality it is. Weber piped up at one point with an allusion that I think went mostly unheard, to the status conferred by the inclusion in an obit’s headline of “the verb”—presumably “Dies.” Something else to take account of in the morning scan.
The obit of the day to crop up in the conversation was that of southwestern mystery novelist Tony Hillerman, with Okrent emitting, virtually in a heartfelt cry, that “the world has changed.” Before the event, I had been looking in The Complete New Yorker at the magazine’s obituary practices over time (81 under the category “Obituary,” another 85 under “Postscript,” numerous others under “Comment”), and bethought myself to see whether it had taken note of Hillerman’s novels.
The earliest citation was from 1970; author: Edmund Wilson. Here was a find! I thought—Wilson, famous for his blinkered dismissal of “detective fiction,” on Tony Hillerman!? In fact, the interminable Wilson piece was the second part of a consideration of “Two Neglected American Novelists,” Henry B. Fuller and Harold Frederic.
Hillerman’s The Blessing Way was reviewed in the appended Briefly Noted section: “Highly recommended.”

_Martin Schneider writes:_
Junot Díaz’s novel only won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and I haven’t heard anyone say a bad word about it. I just got my copy of _The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,_ and I can’t wait to read it! Do attend, it looks like a good time and it’s for a good cause! Press release follows:
Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American author of
_The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,_ is coming to Washington Heights!
Junot will be joining CoSMO, Columbia’s free student-run primary care
clinic, for a book reading and conversation on Friday, November 7th at
7:30pm. All proceeds go toward prescription medications for CoSMO’s
uninsured patients (“www.cosmoprimarycare.org”:www.cosmoprimarycare.org).
The night will also include free appetizers provided by Mamajuana
restaurant, old school hip-hop sounds by DJ Strike (former tour DJ of
De La Soul), and visual arts by the Sound of Art collective
(“www.soundofart.net”:www.soundofart.net)
Don’t miss this incredible night of literature and conversation
celebrating the communities of Quisqueya Heights!!!!
Junot Díaz: A Reading, a Conversation
Friday, November 7th at 7:30pm
Alumni Auditorium
William Black Research Building
650 W. 168th Street
New York, NY 10032
Tickets sold “online”:https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/769922:
$15 general, $10 with student ID

Martin Schneider writes:
Always welcome, a press release from the Mother Ship, reproduced below:
The New Yorker’s Fourth Annual Passport to the Arts Event
A Benefit for Friends of the High Line
October 2, 2008–On Saturday, November 8, 2008, the New Yorker Promotion Department will host its fourth annual Passport to the Arts event, featuring a self-guided tour of twenty-eight leading Chelsea galleries, an evening cocktail reception, and a silent auction benefitting Friends of the High Line. Tickets are $45 and will go on sale, tomorrow, October 3, 2008, at www.ticketweb.com.
On Saturday, November 8th, participants will pick up a program guide, a map, and an official passport at la.venue at the Terminal Stores Building, West 28th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The self-guided tour of the twenty-eight participating galleries goes until 6 p.m. At each gallery, passports will be stamped with a replica of the featured work of art. From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., participants are invited to a cocktail reception at la.venue, featuring a silent auction of works by Marina Adams, Julio Bittencourt, Geoffrey Chadsey, Matt Keegan, Joseph Kosuth, Keith Mayerson, Beatríz Milhazes, Aleksandra Mir, Santi Moix, Matthew Ritchie, Mia Westerlund Roosen, Joshua Smith, Mickalene Thomas, and other artists.
All funds raised by the silent auction and a portion of the proceeds of ticket sales will benefit Friends of the High Line. Friends of the High Line is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and reuse of the High Line, a 1.5-mile elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan. For more information on Friends of the High Line, please visit www.thehighline.org.
The New Yorker’s Passport to the Arts event is presented by Embassy Suites Hotels. It is sponsored by Barclays Capital, Land Rover, and MasterCard World Card, and supported by Kenneth Cole Awearness, LU Biscuits, and the Mexico Tourism Board.
For more information, including a full list of participating galleries and artists, visit www.PassporttotheArtsNYC.com. Tickets are $45 and will be available via TicketWeb at www.ticketweb.com or by phone at 866-468-7610 on October 3rd.

Martin Schneider writes:
Those who crave the intelligent presence of Susan Orlean are invited to attend a special reading of her new children’s book Lazy Little Loafers, which also feature G. Brian Karas’s busy streetscapes with babies of all shapes and sizes.
Orlean’s first picture book tries to resolve the questions of a world-weary older sister who wants to know, Why don’t babies work? Sleeping in strollers, lounging on blankets in the park, lolling on shoulders as they are carried from place to place—what a great deal! It’s enough to drive an older sibling batty! Orlean treats us to a few hilarious theories on the subject (tinged with disgruntlement, of course).
Sounds like fun! I greatly enjoyed Orlean at last year’s Festival, and she has no events scheduled for this year’s Festival (excepting the book signing at 4pm on Saturday, October 4), so you ought to take advantage!
The reading is on Sunday, September 28, 2008, at 4pm, and the location is the powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn.

Comedian Will Franken, whom we have praised before, will perform his solo show “Grandpa It’s Not Fitting” at the Ars Nova Theatre in New York tonight. Please go and support his unique brand of offbeat humor! For more information, check out his “website”:http://www.willfranken.com.

Steven Lukes and Slavoj Zizek will be discussing their new books with Rebecca Mead tomorrow, September 3rd, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. Lukes’s is Moral Relativism, and Zizek’s is Violence. Both are inaugural volumes in Picador’s new series of “Big Ideas/Small Books.” It’s going to be quite an event, believe me! Also, if you’re a Katha Pollitt fan (and in these baffling Sarah Palin days, who isn’t, or can afford not to be?), you may just get a glimpse of her. Consider it a tip!