Bright Lights, Big Reading

You are in your apartment. It's Friday. You're alone. The Chinese take-out you ordered and devoured has given you a brief injection of energy, tinged with a mild stomachache and the melancholic feeling this isn't the first Friday you've sat at home wishing someone would read to you from a...

By P. Scott Cunningham

April 9, 2009

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You are in your apartment. It's Friday. You're alone. The Chinese take-out you ordered and devoured has given you a brief injection of energy, tinged with a mild stomachache and the melancholic feeling this isn't the first Friday you've sat at home wishing someone would read to you from a really good collection of short fiction. Someone like Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City, one of the few novels you've read that penetrated your thick skin of cynicism and made you feel like a human being.

If only someone like that were reading in a beautiful, wood-laden bookstore such as Books & Books tonight, and the book he was reading from, How It Ended, was composed of short stories he'd been writing for more than 20 years and that A.O. Scott of the New York Times compared to the short fiction of Ernest Hemingway. If that were true, you would get off the couch and go to hear it, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?
Fri., April 10, 8 p.m., 2009

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