As the BookExpo show floor shut down Friday night, FishbowlLA blogger Tina Dupuy and I wound up at a party a few blocks up the street at the Figueroa Hotel, and we weren’t even sure who was throwing it (Ingram?). Then we had some misadventures working our way westward—the first party we tried was actually on Saturday, and the second had no drinks and no food—we got to Bar Marmont just as the Weinstein Books staff were bracing themselves for the first arrivals to their celebration. Once we’d staked out a table, we were joined by relationship expert Donna Sozio and her friends, with whom I’d formed an ad hoc party entourage the previous night (starting with Sozio’s publisher, Kensington Books, and winding up with at a downtown bar where Lisa Daily was handing out copies of her novel, Fifteen Minutes of Shame) after meeting at the panel I spoke at about online marketing.
Then we ran into former Forbes executive editor David Andelman, who had just accepted a job editing World Policy, and he told me that the picture I’d taken at his book party, where he was chatting with World Policy Institute director Michele Wucker, was the very moment at which the conversation leading to that job had begun, which was very cool.
Meanwhile, Weinstein authors like Kathy Freston and Jules Asner (who came with her husband, Steven Soderbergh) were mingling their way around the room—I meant to say hello to Benjamin Mee, whose We Bought A Zoo sounds like a fascinating mashup of Marley & Me and Gerald Durrell‘s memoirs, but never quite made it to his vicinity. I did, however, spot National Book Award-winning author Sherman Alexie, who introduced me to Amanda Boyden, whose second novel, Babylon Rolling, is coming out in just a few months from Pantheon. And I ran into the Publishers Weekly posse: editors Mark Rotella, Louisa Ermelino, and Lynn Andriani (joined shortly after the picture below was taken by reporter Rachel Deahl and editor-in-chief Sara Nelson); I’m pretty sure I spotted Kirkus editor Elaine Szewczyk, and New York book man Boris Kachka turned his camera on me at some point, too.
