WORD: Get Your Lit Crawl On (NYC Style)! – Douglas Wright
It’s that time of year again. Fall is here, the weather is breezy, and the cooling summer heat has released the sweaty citizens of New York from their air-conditioned, rat-trap apartments. It’s high time to slip on your 1940s vintage frames and that tweed jacket with the elbow patches, and come out for the fifth annual Lit Crawl NYC this weekend.
On Saturday night, Sept. 15th, New York lit fans will descend onto the streets of downtown Manhattan for a wandering bar crawl from reading to reading throughout the East Village and Lower East Side (for the full schedule of events, click here).
Inspired by the San Francisco’s annual Litquake, it’s really just an excuse to drink with fellow writers and celebrate fiction/poetry/prose outside the stuffy setting of somber (and sober) bookstores.
23 readings, hundreds of fiction fans, and whole lot of surprises with events like Lit Trivia with SoHo press, a BOMB Poetry Smackdown, Liars’ League live readings of short stories performed by professional actors, and a Mini-Lit Carnival by theNewerYork magazine with cut-up and experimental collaborations involving their second issue.
And… the master Irvine Welsh will be reading part of Skagboys (his new prequel to Trainspotting) at R-Bar on the Bowery around 8 pm.
Be assured that we’ll be in attendance (not sure about this dude reading The Prophet in a mask… but we’re hoping he’s out and about, too).
And if you’d like to join me on my Saturday odyssey as part of the ongoing “In Search for the NYC Fiction Scene” series, my schedule-in-progress is as follows:
6 pm… Center for Fiction presents Fake It! at KGB Bar
7 pm… Literature and Libations at Von Bar (21+)
8 pm… Mini-Lit Carnival at Vig Bar (21+) & Liars’ League: Lies We’ve Told at One Mile House Bar
See you there!
D.A. Wright
