B(r)ook(lyn) Bound

I see The Village Voice just picked BookCourt in Brooklyn as New York City's best bookstore. I've never been -- my recent trip to the Brooklyn Book Festival was one of my few appearances in the land of hipsters -- but with the number of book shops in Manhattan dwindling by the month, I'm ready to jump on the subway and check it out.

I actually wanted to go out there earlier this week -- but had to work -- to see Benjamin Anastas, whose memoir, "Too Good to Be True," got a pretty good review in the New York Times on Tuesday. I got to hear Ben read from it briefly at the aforementioned book festival -- during the Writing the Unthinkable: Memoir and the Artist panel -- but the discussion was divided between him, Reyna Grande ("Across a Hundred Mountains," which sounds like a heart-wrenching memoir about growing up in Mexico without your parents because they've gone to America to forge a better life "for you") and guitarist Eric Erlandson of Hole ("Letters to Kurt," poems of things he wishes he had said to his late friend; not really my cup of tea).

The selection Ben read didn't exactly win me -- or, it would seem, a lot of the audience -- over. But the second he later explained where the title came from -- when he was 3, in the early 1970s, his mother had the entire family participating in a fringe-therapy group in Massachusetts, and at some point she was instructed to hang signs around the necks of each family member with phrases to describe her feelings about each, and little Ben was dubbed "too good to be true," a phrase he says has haunted him through his life, especially when his first two novels were well-received and he married the woman of his dreams -- everyone was on board. (It was kind of hilarious listening to this old man stand up and chastise Anastas, a rather acclaimed writer, for not winning us over from the get-go!) When I got home and discovered that his Anastas' wife had had a "revenge affair" while she was pregnant with their child -- and had actually run off with the other man -- then I knew this was the book for me! (Ben talked to the ArtsBeat blog yesterday HERE; order the book HERE.)

Later that same day, my friend Leah and I barely squeezed into the panel Creative Life in NYC: Art, Music and Creative Culture in the '70s '80s and Beyond, featuring James Wolcott ("Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York"),Nile Rodgers ("Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny") and Cynthia Carr ("Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz"), during which the trio discussed art, music, and creativity in New York City through the decades. Will Hermes ("Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever") moderated. Not counting the asshole behind us who wouldn't shut the fuck up, this was another fantastic, if slightly ill-conceived, reading. Nile Rodgers really warranted a panel unto himself -- the man has worked with everybody and has stories! -- so I felt kind of bad for Wolcott, whose memoir I have been slowly getting through,  and Carr, whose book about the largely forgotten a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist and activist sounds terrific.

But before I get to "Too Good to Be True," I'm in the midst of reading "This American Life" contributor Michael Beaumier's "I Know You're Out There: Private Longings, Public Humiliations and Other True Stories of Looking for Love ," his 2006 memoir in which he writes about his life as the editor of the personals section of an alternative weekly in Chicago, which is slowly his only escape from an unhappy relationship at home. His writing style reminds me a bit of my own, and if you're not sold on the premise just yet, hearing him read this particularly poignant chapter on NPR will likely make a convert out of you. (Click Act 3 HERE.) Order paperback HERE and Kindle edition HERE.