8 PM, FRI. APRIL 13
PARTY # 28!
Art Exhibit/Live Music
Drink complimentary wine while viewing over forty works by four of the best artists in central Jersey (hand picked by Raconteur proprietor Alex Dawson) and listening to live jazz guitar/violin by Steve Kaplan & Co. Paintings by Larry Mintz, photographs by Kristy Lauricella, dioramas/sculptures by Leon Walsh, illustrations by Chris Gash. FREE!
8 PM, FRI. APRIL 20
GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING
Inger Frimansson
Reading/Signing
Considered Sweden's premier mystery writer, international noir author Frimansson has written 25 novels, 7 of them thrillers. She received The Swedish Academy of Mystery Authors Award for Best Swedish Crime Novel for both Good Night, My Darling and its sequel The Shadow in the Water, making her the only female crime author to win this award twice. Frimansson's novels have been translated into several languages and published in various editions throughout Europe and the Netherlands. Good Night, My Darling is the first English translation of her work. FREE!
7 PM, SAT. MAY 5
WORD FEST 2007
20 writers. 4 hours. 2 intermissions. 1 vaudeville venue.
Featuring 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter); Oscar nominated screenwriter Robert Festinger (In the Bedroom); O' Henry award winner Douglas Light (East Fifth Bliss); author Sigrid Nunez, whose latest novel The Last of Her Kind was labeled "remarkable" by The New York Times and "dazzling" by The Boston Globe, NPR regular Robert Kaplow, whose last book Me and Orson Welles was just optioned by filmmaker Richard Linklater; memoirist Jeremy Mercer (Time Was Soft There), whose recent reminiscence was touted by famed Beat Lawrence Ferlinghetti and won raves from The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal; Nebula award winner Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), whose stories have been called "cross-genre gems," by Time Out New York, "amazing" by New York Magazine and "intoxicating," by Alice Sebold; literary wunderkind/Booker Prize finalist Paul Watkins (Little White Lies), who's been dubbed the heir to Hemingway by Entertainment Weekly and whose work has been called "an amazing tour de force" by Newsday; former Paris Review editor Elizabeth Gaffney, whose Dickensian debut Metropolis has been called "thrilling, elegant and massive," by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, "brawny, old school storytelling," by Newsweek and "a literary page-turner," by Vanity Fair; novelist Rich Perez (The Loser's Club), whose clear-eyed chronicle of The East Village has been praised by Tama Janowitz, Barry Gifford, Poppy Z. Brite and Mary Gaitskill; and storyteller Clay Mcleod Chapman (The Pumpkin Pie Show), who's been called "hauntingly poetic" by Time Out New York, compared to Faulkner by The Village Voice and described as a "demon angel on a skateboard" by acclaimed author Tom Robbins. And more! $20 Gen Pub; $15 Students/Seniors. The Forum Theatre.
8 PM, SAT. MAY 12
DAVID BLAKE
Reading/Disquisition/Signing
WALT WHITMAN & THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN CELEBRITY
David Haven Blake, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, views Walt Whitman and his work in relation to the rise of celebrity culture in the nineteenth century -- the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, and PT Barnum -- paying particular attention to the emerging ideas of publicity, promotion, and society's changing notions of fame. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon. Books on sale at the event. FREE!
