LARB

While not entirely correct, this preview of forthcoming articles from the Los Angeles Review of Books website still looks nice:

Rumor has it that the article itself will be out tomorrow...

The Strand

I first learned about the Strand Bookstore and its "18 miles of books" by way of its ads back in the Seventies when, living in Salt Lake City, my main connection to NYC was a subscription to The Village Voice. In 2004, when I began dating Deborah, often commuting to New York on the weekends, the Strand was the first bookstore she took me to. And when I interviewed Michael Seidenberg, Paul Nelson's close friend, back in 2006 when I began writing Everything Is an Afterthought, he told me this story about moving Paul into his apartment at 400 East Seventy-Fourth Street on the Upper East Side:

Moved him into the apartment that he lived in up until the end, which was a five-story walkup. We had to take tons of trips. All Paul’s books were in Strand bags. Hundreds and hundreds of Strand bags, filled with books. The kind of amount that you feel you’ll never be done.

Several years before that, when Paul's son Mark came to visit him in 1985 and someone snapped a photo to commemorate the event, a Strand bag can be seen in the background:

It's fitting, then, that the first official event for Everything Is an Afterthought should be at--you guessed it--the Strand. On Wednesday, November 9, at 7 PM in the Rare Book Room on the third floor, Paul's old friend and SiriusXM Radio host Dave Marsh will be joining me on the Strand stage. You can read more about it by clicking here.

I hope you can join us.

Elvis Mitchell

This just in from film critic Elvis Mitchell, host of KCRW's The Treatment:

“I found that Conversations with Clint is invaluable reading, not just because it’s a uniquely in-depth series of interviews with someone who always had a sense of himself as an enduring figure. It also takes us inside the head of Paul Nelson—the interviewer himself—whose states of mind complete the story. The best interviews have always been two-sided—a conversation—and Conversations is just that: a compelling look at an extended eyeball-to-eyeball encounter, complete with blinks and flinches.”