Anthology fever

I gave a reading last night with Rachel Sherman and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh at the Lillian Vernon Writers' House (it was fun), for the students at the NYU summer session. There I also got to pick up a copy of They're At It Again: An Open City Reader, edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas.

It's huge—I didn't realize it was nearly 800 pages. Who's in it? A quick glance yields Paul Bowles, Jonathan Ames, Geoff Dyer, Bryan Charles, the aforementioned R.S. and S.S., Davids Means and Shields, Sam Lipsyte, Martha McPhee, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Walter Kirn, James Lasdun, Victor Pelevin, Hal Sirowitz, Edmund White, Leni Zumas, Richard Yates (!), Charles Bukowski, Will Eno, Sylvia Foley, Hubert Selby Jr., Jessica Shattuck...the list really does go on...It's satisfyingly heavy, and I'm excited that my story "Bring on the Dancing Horses" (from Open City #30) is included...

*

A slimmer book, but with nearly as many contributors, is No Near Exit, an anthology of writing from Post Road magazine, each one selected by a different writer, making for a vertiginous reading experience. Plus, some of the pieces are interviews with writers, and others are writers recommending books by other writers...

Exciting minutiae

A nice mention of Personal Days on the New Yorker's Book Bench! Lee Ellis writes:

Perhaps writing fiction about work in any meaningful way is challenging, but I don't think it's impossible. A few recent examples come to mind. The first is Ed Park’s "Personal Days." From the stinging embarrassment of the company softball team’s record-setting losses to the odd, enchanting power of a Post-it, Park repeatedly finds ways to turn the minutiae of office work into exciting, inviting prose. As for stories that take on both cubicle and spreadsheet, check out Ben Marcus’s recent bizarre yet rewarding “The Moors” in Tin House, or David Foster Wallace’s “Wiggle Room” in this magazine (an excerpt from his third, unfinished novel "The Pale King"). I'm also looking forward to Sam Lipsyte's forthcoming "The Ask", which is getting quite a bit of attention. It's a book that in part deals with both the destructive and encouraging aspects of office culture.

Ummm, same paragraph with Ben Marcus, DFW, and Sam Lipsyte? Heyyy—I'll take it™!

(Side note: The Ask = even better than Home Land. Trust me™!)