Party Hopping

By Neal 

I like Knopf’s backlist a lot–yeah, you’re thinking, that’s stepping out on a limb–and the authorial roster of associate publisher Victoria Wilson is a large part of the reason why. Many of my favorite authors at the house–Peter Bogdanovich, Henry Bromell, the late Gavin Lambert–turn out to be people she brought into the fold, and Mick Foley has said that when various publishers were making bids on Tietam Brown, “I was just so impressed with [her] that I ended up taking the lowest offer with the promise of the most rewriting…When I finally did come up with ways to make the story work to her liking, it really felt like a great accomplishment.” I mention all this because Wilson will be conducting a dialogue with another one of her writers, Jill Ciment, at the Housing Works Café tonight (in a mediabistro.com-sponsored event), and they should have a lot to say about what happens to a manuscript between acceptance and publication.

New York literati can pretty much run straight from that event to Junno’s, where Julian Rubinstein will be hosting a cocktail party where you can sign a birthday card for Attila, the anti-hero of his nonfiction book, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. He even got Johnnie Walker to serve up free “whiskey robbers,” a whiskey sour with bitters and ginger ale. If you’re not in New York, all’s not lost: similar bashes are planned in eight other North American cities and nine European locales, plus Sydney and Bogota, Colombia. Check Rubinstein’s site for exact locations, or I suppose you could throw your own party and email him later to ask where you can send the card. He’ll also be talking up the festivities all day today at The Elegant Variation.