Back on Monday, we heard about Ayelet Waldman‘s Books4Barack drive, which wound up raising more than $57,000 for Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign in less than a week. Response to the fundraiser—which provided a bag of ten signed books by a random assortment of authors in exchange for a $250 donation—was so overwhelming that Waldman finally had to admit she was in over her head: “My house looks like a cross between a fulfillment center and Gray Gardens,” she reported yesterday, announcing the program’s closure.
But Obama has other supporters in America’s literary communities. On October 5, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, Ann Packer, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders, Jane Smiley, and Abraham Verghese will take part at a Sunday brunch reading at the San Francisco home of Ellen Sussman. Nearby, on October 16, novelist Robert Mailer Anderson hosts a reading with Isabel Allende, Tamim Ansary, Michael Chabon, Anne Lamott and Tobias Wolff.
New York City’s literati are getting into the game as well: On October 4, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Suketu Mehta, Manil Suri, and Akhil Sharma are headlining a reception at Le Poisson Rouge.
As always, if any authors are going to similar lengths for the on-again, off-again campaign of John McCain, we’ll be happy to mention them here. It’s actually a bit surprising: We would’ve thought to have heard of a few political thriller writers, at least, would’ve casted their lot with McCain by now and put together some show of support.