This Thursday at 7 pm I’ll be reading as part of the Animal Farm series, which is held, appropriately, at Happy Ending, located at 302 Broome St. I haven’t decided fully decided what I’m reading yet, but it will be something unpublished, and I promise sex or violence, and quite possibly both. Full description below.
BE ADVISED:
THURSDAY, MAY 13 IS MORE ANIMAL FARM READING SERIES:
DALE PECK,
GABRIELLE ZEVIN,
SAM MUNSON,
DANIEL GUZMÁN
“All reading series are equal, but some reading series are more equal than others.”
In the spirit of that heroic leader of animals, Napoleon, in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, the Animal Farm Reading Series is dedicated to the promotion of equality between writers—especially the most famous and respected writers.
Animal Farm is your destination for the newest and best writing with a satirical and/or critical sensibility. The series features literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—the important thing is that every writer’s work in some way or another derides, attacks, or quibbles with something external to itself.
In addition to new writing by great writers, every event at Animal Farm will also feature Field Reports. For the uninitiated: Field Reports are essays, written by accomplished writers, about other readings in New York’s readings scene that the writers have gone to see at some point.
Animal Farm is the second Thursday of every month at 8:00 pm. The location is Happy Ending, at 302 Broome St., between Forsyth St. and Eldridge St. The events are free.
ANIMAL FARM ANIMAL FARM ANIMAL FARM
On Thursday, May 13, authors Dale Peck, Gabrielle Zevin, and Sam Munson will read their work.
Daniel Guzmán and Patrick W. Gallagher will read Field Reports.
Daniel Guzmán’s stories have appeared in New York Press, L Magazine’s Literary Upstart series, Mama D’s Arts Bordello, Rosebud Magazine, and the Moth Storytelling Series. www.danielguzman.org
Patrick W. Gallagher is the Host of Animal Farm (HOAF). His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Glasses Glasses, The Adirondack Review, The Battered Suitcase, PopMatters, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Wheelhouse, and elsewhere. He is a former managing editor of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and currently a contributing editor to Open City. Plus, Patrick is writing his PhD thesis in the department of Comparative Literature at NYU.
Sam Munson’s writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement, among other venues. He is the former Web Editor of Commentary magazine, and he graduated from the University of Chicago in 2003. Doubleday will publish his first novel, The November Criminals, in Spring 2010. Munson is also the grandson of Norman Podhoretz.
Gabrielle Zevin’s four novels have been translated into over twenty languages and received many honors. Her most recent book, The Hole We’re In, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She also wrote the screenplay for the movie Conversations with Other Women, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.
In August, Dale Peck will publish Shift, the first volume of the Gate of Orpheus trilogy, which he co-authored with Tim Kring (a.k.a. “the Heroes guy”). It will be his tenth book. That’s a little misleading though—he’s actually written something like thirteen or fourteen. Some of them just weren’t good enough to be published. Although who knows, a lot of people, many of whom are employed by the New York Times Book Review or Dave Eggers, would say that the books he did publish weren’t so hot either. So there you go.
Peck’s also had stories and essays in most of the major magazines and newspapers—usually just one per venue, which might or might not mean something—but the New Yorker still hasn’t touched him. Ditto Harper’s. The Atlantic did publish him however. Twice, in fact. They even came back a third time—for a review of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day if you can believe that—but Peck was so late with the piece that they finally stopped emailing, and anyway, it was just the Atlantic, which everyone knows isn’t even as good as Harper’s, let alone the New Yorker. And besides, you can always read the review on Peck’s website if you want to, which is pretty much the same as reading it on the Atlantic’s, the only difference being that you might experience the internet equivalent of watching a tumbleweed roll the length of a dusty street between rows of boarded-up buildings as you scroll down Peck’s beautifully designed but largely unvisited homepage, whereas with the Atlantic you get the sense that other people, mostly in Cambridge, MA, and Berkeley, are reading with you, although not as many as read Harper’s or the New Yorker, let alone something like, I don’t know, a truly literary magazine like Esquire, which publishes James Franco, or HTMLGIANT, which makes fun of Esquire for publishing James Franco.
So, uh, what else? He’s scored a couple of O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart, and all the way back in 1993 or 1994 he got a Guggenheim (the fact that his publisher’s mother’s maiden name was Guggenheim had nothing to do with this). This year he’s up for his third or fourth or maybe even fifth Lammy, which are the gay awards if you’ve never heard of them—the gay writing awards, as opposed to the awards for being gay, which is what GLAAD gives out—and anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of them, since most of the stuff that gets nominated for a Lammy makes the stuff that appears in the Atlantic look better than the stuff in Harper’s, maybe even the New Yorker. And, too, Peck’s pretty sure he’s going to lose yet again, and to a former student no less.
So yeah: lots of books, lots of stories and essays, lots of unwon Lammies. “Lammie,” by the way, is the diminutive of Lambda, which is the Greek letter that looks a little bit like an upside down V (uppercase) or upside down y (lowercase) and is for some reason associated with homosexuality, even though neither version of the letter looks like a penis. Also by the way: the student who’s going to beat him, Nick Burd, whose novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary couldn’t even have been written without Peck’s help, came out of the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, where Peck has taught since 1999, which shows sticktoitiveness if nothing else. Alas, there aren’t any Lammies for that, although it will get you a job in the Catholic Church. More recently, Peck co-founded the Mischief and Mayhem writing collective with four other writers he’s not going to name here because he’s too lazy check the spelling of all their names—or who knows, maybe he just wants to hog the spotlight a little longer, although that’s a bit Quixotic, isn’t it, given that Mischief and Mayhem hasn’t actually done anything yet and, you know, this is the Animal Farm Reading Series, which isn’t exactly Happy Endings—and anyway, if you want to know their names you can always go to his website, where you can also read his review of Thomas Pynchon’s very, very, very long novel, Against the Day.
Please, go to his website. He paid a lot of money for it.
And so anyway, yeah, that’s pretty much Peck’s career, or at least the broad strokes. To recap: slapped by Stanley Crouch, photographed by Stephen Wright, had his Manhunt profile forwarded to Gawker—although you would only know the last thing if you were employed by Gawker Media, Inc., since a friend of Peck’s who worked there at the time kept it out of general circulation. Come to think of it, you might also know it if you were the douchebag who forwarded his profile to Gawker in the first place, in which case: get a life, dude. Really. For the record, though, Peck wouldn’t have minded too much if Gawker had posted his profile, since he didn’t have any naked pictures on that particular site, let alone anything like Andrew Sullivan’s “big hairy thighs squatting 8 plates” on barebackcity.com, and plus Manhunt brought Lou Peralta into his life, who as of January 30th is his (Peck’s, not Sullivan’s) legal husband in five states and the District of Columbia. Peck would tell the other forty-five states (and Puerto Rico, and Guam) to go fuck themselves, but some of them are nice places to go for vacation. Especially Puerto Rico, which is probably why the US stole it from Spain in the first place.