Don't let the impending blizzard discourage you from making plans on Wednesday, because there is at least one thing worth tromping through the snow for (assuming we actually get some this time).
Just in time for the big V-day, Harper's Magazines has assembled three novelists and Harper's contributors for Love: A Rebuke, a reading and discussion that promises to help you get into the spirit of the season (whatever that spirit may mean for you, including a sudden surge of affection for one's cats) in the cozy space of the Housing Works Bookstore.
Heidi Julavits, novelist and founding editor of The Believer, will surely be offering her rebuke on the fantasy-fueled genre of romance. She once described her novel The Effects of Living Backward as "a love story between two people who hate each other, which is my favorite kind of love story."
Joining Julavits is a fellow New Yorker and prolific fiction writer, Sam Lipsyte, who currently teaches at Columbia. But don't be fooled by his impressive body of work or his academic acumen. This will surely be no professorly lecture. Lipsyte, who once wrote an essay from the point-of-view of a pimple on Drew Barrymore's butt -- entitled, in fact, "A Pimple on the Ass of Drew Barrymore Speaks"-- has been called the "funniest writer of his generation" and should bring a little humor to the complex issues of both loving and rebuking and any combination thereof.
The charming Colson Whitehead, author of four novels -- most recently the coming of age story Sag Harbor -- is a Manhattan native who moved to Brooklyn, a recent mecca for writers, 14 years ago "for the cheap rent." Just don't ask him what's it like being a writer in Brooklyn, because he already answered that in an essay for the Times entitled "I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It." He says, "I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. What do you expect me to say? 'Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous?'"
If that doesn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy, hopefully the mulled cider and fresh chocolate chip cookies will.
When: Wednesday, February 10, 7 p.m.
Where: Housing Works Bookstore Café, 126 Crosby Street
Cost: Free
