We were invited out to lunch at Nobu Tuesday with a few other media types—including Publishers Weekly editor and novelist Jonathan Segura—to meet Irish novelist Cecelia Ahern; we were among the first to arrive, and while we waited for everyone else to show up, we chatted with Ahern about whether she made it to New York much (“a few times a year, actually”) and her shopping plans for later in the afternoon. We noted that it was just about a year ago, during a trip to Iceland, that we observed many Europeans who had come to the U.S. to take advantage of the then-weak dollar, and that it must be very different this year. The exchange rate this fall wasn’t so good for shopping this year, Ahern agreed, “but it’s better for being paid in dollars.”
(Which was indirectly related to the impetus for the luncheon; after her first four novels had been published in the U.S. by Hyperion, HarperCollins, which had been publishing her all along in the rest of the English-speaking world, was gearing up to publish her latest, Thanks for the Memories, next April.)
A few hours later, when we met Tim Molloy at La Palapa Tuesday night, we got to talking about his experience working with Virgin Books, the publishers of his debut novel, How to Break Bad News, a romantic comedy about an investigative journalist working undercover at a Mexican restaurant. He told us about how he hadn’t been all that enthusiastic about the original cover art they showed him, so he’d actually gone out to a restaurant, jammed two taco shells together in the shape of a heart, photographed his handiwork and sent it to them as a suggestion. “They turned it down,” he laughed, “and then two weeks later, they sent me another message and they’d gone ahead and did it.” Although, he added, they’d streamlined the concept a bit by finding some clip art photos of tacos and digitally editing them together into the final version shown above.
We went straight to Housing Works from Molloy’s party to catch the second half of the used bookstore’s annual “Gin Mingle,” where staffers estimated that approximately 300 writers and other publishing insiders had converged to drink free gin and listen to hit songs of the ’80s and ’90s. Among those spotted in the crowd: independent publicist Lauren Cerand and Picador publicity director James Meader, plus former FishbowlNY and Huffington Post editor Rachel Sklar and Smith publisher Larry Smith.
Shortly after 10 p.m., the party’s official end time, the crowd showed no signs of slowing down—in fact, the DJ was practically goading them into starting a mosh pit with a medley of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Crazy,” and “Eye of the Tiger.” From one of the store’s two spiral staircases, executive director Susie Lupert looked down at the crowd. “I’m starting to worry,” she said, although her eyes conveyed a much less anxious mood. “I don’t know how I’m going to get everyone to leave.” We took off at that point, but we hear it wasn’t too much later that the party did in fact move on to Botanica where people danced on tables, apparently.