Scene @ Allen Shawn’s Book Party

By Neal 

allen-shawn.jpg

Allen Shawn greets guests at the party celebrating the publication of Wish I Could Be There, which combines a layman’s tour of the science behind phobias with a memoir of Shawn’s own experiences with claustrophobia and agoraphobia. (I interviewed Shawn for Publishers Weekly back in November.) The Saturday night party, hosted by Upper East Side rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, drew an assortment of literati, including New Yorker humorists Andy Borowitz and Patricia Marx, along with Deborah Eisenberg, Francine Prose, and Louis Begley. I also chatted briefly with NYT reporter Joyce Wadler, who wrote a profile of Shawn for the Styles section last month.