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Upcoming Salons

NYC | February 21, 2010

We’re cutting the February chill with four literary luminaries, a fabulous musical guest, and heaps of hope for Haiti. Please consider donating to the Haitian Health Foundation and join us in the warm and welcoming subterranean Jimmys 43 (7th St. b/w 2nd & 3rd Aves) at 7pm!

Hettie Jones is a poet and prose writer, author of How I Became Hettie Jones, a memoir of the “beat scene” of the fifties and sixties, currently available in a paperback edition from Grove Press. Jones’s short prose has been published in journals such as Fence, Global City Review and Ploughshares, and she has also written numerous books for children and young adults. In 1998 Jones’s poetry collection, Drive, was issued by Hanging Loose Press. Drive won the Poetry Society of America’s 1999 Norma Farber First Book Award. Jones’s second collection, All Told, was published in 2003. Her third collection, Doing 70, appeared in March 2007 and Marie Ponsot writes in Commonweal, “tuneful poems…centered and engaged….I know of no other poet’s voice so at ease in welcoming the fact that we are all people of color, “looking/for bread but asking/ for roses.” Jones teaches currently in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School and at the 92nd St. Y Poetry Center. The mother of two grown daughters, Hettie Jones lives in Manhattan’s East Village. She is currently at work on Love, H. a memoir in letters; Race Tracks, a book of linked stories; and Press Firmly, a collection of new and selected poems.

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. After playing Dungeons & Dragons religiously in the 1970s and 1980s, Ethan Gilsdorf went on to become a poet, teacher, and journalist. In …

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So many good books to read these days. Where to start? Check out our latest reviews, books by alumni and tempting recommendations.

{REVIEWED} Ask the Dust

By René Georg Vasicek
Ask the Dust is a dangerous book. Arturo Bandini, the narrator, is a terrorist of the mind. He explodes reality and makes you believe in the urgency of now: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

I didn’t think literature was possible in Los Angeles, and then I read Ask the Dust (1939) by John Fante. At the time I thought I was finished with American novels, too busy devouring the Europeans: Knut Hamsun, Robert Musil, Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald. Then one day I was killing time …

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