Trish Ryan sent us some photos from her reading at the Harvard Coop Bookstore last week, where more than 100 people came in to hear her read from He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, a memoir about “faith, hope, and happily ever after.” One of Ryan’s friends turned her book cover into a cake frosting and, after she entertained the crowd with stories like the one about the time a guy came out to her in the middle of the first date—”there was some power in my attempts to use feng shui to attract a man,” she quips, “the only problem was quality control”—she brought out her “happily ever after”: her husband, Steve.
While I was away in Los Angeles two weeks ago, the Housing Works Used Book Café hosted a party for Gilbert King‘s The Execution of Willie Francis, a nonfiction book about a seventeen-year-old African-American who survived the electric chair in 1946, and the Cajun lawyer who took Willie’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court to save him from a second execution. Author Karen Abbott and her editor, Julia Cheiffetz, were among those who came to cheer King on, along with Louisianans like Gus Weill, A. P. Tureaud, Jr., and Paul Jackson of Basic Books. Michael Gorin and Shlomo Pestcoe played traditional Cajun and Creole music while chef Abe Delahoussaye served up regional delicacies.
And here’s Lynn Lurie, reading from her Juniper Prize-winning debut novel, Corner of the Dead, at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble a few days before that. Lurie’s story about a photojournalist caught up in the genocidal violence of Peru’s Shining Path has gotten raves from readers like Ben Fountain, Terese Svoboda, and Elie Wiesel.