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From independent bookstores such as McNally Jackson Books in SoHo to long-time forums such as the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side, T Cooper, author, most recently, of The Beaufort Diaries, visits his favorite places to research, revise, and read in New York City.
From F. Scott Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, Joan Didion to Raymond Chandler, many writers have been inspired by Los Angeles. In this installment of City Guides, Carolyn Kellogg, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and Jacket Copy blogger, visits her favorite haunts made famous by writers of both past and present.
The city of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists has produced many prominent writers in its past, but it is also a city whose literary history is still in the making. Ifeanyi Menkiti, who was born in Onitsha, Nigeria, and moved to Massachusetts eventually becoming owner of the nation’s oldest poetry bookstore, tours the vast literary landscape of the greater Boston area.
Lee Montgomery, editorial director of Tin House Books, moved to Portland, Oregon, twenty years ago but never meant to stay. It was a charming Victorian house, the rain and clouds, and the energy of the places featured in this guide that compelled the writer in her to hunker down and take advantage of a city brimming with literary offerings.
Beginning this year New Poets for Peace, the New York City branch of Poets for Peace—a grassroots group that for the past decade has held free, donation-optional readings across the country to raise funds for international relief organizations—plans to host an event every six weeks in Manhattan, including a special reading and silent auction on March 21 in observance of the seventh anniversary of the U.S. military's invasion of Iraq.
Novelist Tom Perrotta visited the University of New Hampshire in Durham as part of its Writers Series on an early March afternoon that was sunny enough for New Englanders to shed their wool caps and warm enough for the giant sand-filled snow banks that lined the roads to recede ever so slightly.
On a sultry Friday night, amid the thumping bass notes from cruising cars and the occasional thunder of the elevated J train, a wonderfully distinctive literary event took place in the dim white rooms of a studio space in northeast Brooklyn.
Fueled by equal parts biodiesel gas and small press ambition, the Wave Books 2006 Poetry Bus Tour is scheduled to roll through forty-nine cities during the next two months, beginning in Seattle on September 4.
Another day, another strange encounter in an airport. This one with Charles D’Ambrosio, who wound up on the same flight as ours from Portland to Seattle.
Why is Portland, Oregon, my favorite city in which to read? Let me count the ways.
