[
Editor's note: Don't miss Nathan Englander at the City of Books on Friday, February 17. See our
events calendar for all the details.]
You think I'm not going to miss you all? Well, I am. Today is my last day blogging for Powell's. And I promised I'd find a way to write this earlier and not when I'm racing to the next reading, but, inevitably, that's how things go during book tour.
In Boston now. My hotel is on Commonwealth Avenue, the street on which my mother was born. It's a mighty long street, so this hotel itself has zero historical significance. But it does offer a nice view of the avenue, which I'll cheat into a little extra faux-niceness by way of Hipstamatic.
If you're unfamiliar with Hipstamatic, it makes everything look a little more charming than the situation might really want it to be. Here, for example, is the wooden-horse-going-crazy lamp in my room. I almost want to take home its Hipstamatic wild-horse version.
On the flip side, if you're very-very familiar with the app, you may, at this point, find it a really annoying, cloying way to deliver an image. I happen to love it still. But I'm old enough to have original, actual photos that look that way ? photos with me in them, in plaid suits and saddle shoes.
Tonight I'm currently late for Harvard Bookstore, though I'm very excited to get there and read. (And I just got to have dinner in New Orleans with the store's general manager, Carole Horne. [Watch a YouTube video of Carole Horne talking about two of her favorite books.])
And as long as I'm talking about other bookstores ? and thank you, unthreatened and wonderful Powell's, for letting me blog on a week where I'm talking about so many others ? Colum McCann was an angel last night at Greenlight.
We both teach in the MFA at Hunter College, and a number of our outstanding students and ex-students were hiding in the crowd. It was great to see them. And doing a talk down the block from your house is always especially sweet.
And, for another segue: speaking of outstanding, the literary quarterly Electric Literature sent someone down from their own blog to attend, so there's a better firsthand account than mine, and some photos to boot.
After the signing, I went off to raise a glass with the students and some writer friends on the corner. Then my girlfriend and I, and my editor and her husband, had a lovely dinner at Dino's, our neighborhood Italian. With a new collection out in the world, it was a nice, quiet place to sit together and take stock.