Authors (top to bottom): Boris Fishman, Paul Greenberg and Arthur PhillipsOn November 4, KGB Bar lived up to its name with a reading from Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, an anthology of stories that explore the hopes and cynicism of the denizens of post-communist Eastern Europe. The readers—Arthur Phillips, Paul Greenberg and Boris Fishman (who edited the collection)—presented faux accents, Czech spies, tadpoles, rolling clowns, Satan the Caterer and Russian toasts.

Paul Greenberg, whose first novel, Leaving Katya, was selected for Barnes and Nobles' Discover Great New Writers series, read from "The Subjunctive Mood" in which a UN bureaucrat moves to Paris with his girlfriend, a clown in training. Returning to Paris from Sarajevo, where two fingers were blown off, he finds clowns rolling on his mattress listening to Daft Punk (a capella accompaniment provided by Mr. Greenberg). "Listen clown," he says to his girlfriend's wine-drinking clown Professor. The Professor, who sounded like Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther, responds "you say clown like it's an insult."

"I'm following Pépé le Peu," Arthur Phillips, the next reader, said before channeling a female Czech spy in his short story, "Wenceslas Square." The spy is a woman with whom the protagonist, a diplomat, has passable sex with while listening to the Beatles in Czech. On his romantic entanglement with a woman he knows is a spy, the diplomat notes, "that there were other realities shrouding this one didn't mean that this one didn't mean anything." Just then, there was a ruckus upstairs due to a theatrical performance all of which Phillips handled with the aplomb of a game-show contestant, "it's the Beaujolais clown," he said smiling. It was difficult not to see in Phillips the Jeopardy champion he once was, standing upright, one hand wrapped around his other wrist, frequently making eye-contact with audience members and rattling off polite self-deprecating jokes. Phillips has also authored several novels, the second of which, The Egyptologist, was a national and international bestseller.

"I have no patience for store-bought dog costumes," one member of the audience said to another during the break. It was, after all, the weekend following Halloween. The other responded, "I was Satan the Caterer."

Boris Fishman, veteran journal born in Minsk, Belarus, read last from his fictional story "The Conversion of the Kaufmans." A young Russian-American man, who upon being sent on assignment to write an article on observing the Sabbath, decides to become a devout Jew, meanwhile being called by his mother, Mother Kaufman, among other things: "cucumber," "porcupine," "tadpole." "eggplant," and "little sausage." When Mother Kaufman says "Die among the Jews, live among the gentiles," Little Kaufman, at first, dutifully obeys his mother, dating a gentile with alabaster legs that wrapped around his neck like "pythons."

"I love to see an author working out his mother issues in public," said Fishman's friend, Steve Zeichek after the reading when Fishman invited the audience members to have some Jack Daniels courtesy of his girlfriend. Over at his table he poured several shot glasses full and passed them around. When the glasses were lifted, Fishman looked at Suzanne Dottino, who didn't have a glass, and said, "in Russia, when someone doesn't have a drink you cheers the nose." And in a spirit that would have made the patrons of any Russian bar proud he lightly toasted her nose with the foot of his glass.

- Rozi Jovanovic

The Harvard Lampoon WritersSimon Rich read from Ant Farm, his debut collection. "It's all about fear and doom," said a melancholic Rich about the subject of his new collection, which though not as gloomy as one would think has a story entitled ":(" that contains the line "i used 2 B a typical teenage girl...that was B4 i contracted hepatitis C." What is the next one about? "It's also about fear and doom. Yeah, I'm surprised my publishers agreed to let me do another book on the same subject." The next book, entitled Free-Range Chickens, about free-range chickens and their day-to-day activities, is due out in August. As an English major, Rich opted out of pursuing English with honors so he could design a more personally tailored curriculum that had "less Shakespeare," and more "black plague and monkeys." Rich, who graduated in June, is now a writer with Saturday Night Live. By whom was Rich inspired? "Philip Roth, T.C. Boyle and The Simpsons. Mostly The Simpsons."

Lizzie Widdicombe, an energetic reader, presented a faux non-fiction work entitled Untold Secrets: A Secret History of the CIA, that purportedly had chapters devoted to hot tub scenes and how the CIA celebrate Christmas. Widdicombe read to much laughter. The narrator was an investigative reporter, who as a child, liked to take things apart to understand how they function and who, upon seeing her baby brother brought home from the hospital began to think of all his parts and joints. It was difficult not to listen to Widdicombe, a reporter for The New Yorker, and not imagine her as a choleric child taking apart her dolls to reveal how they functioned. 

Next, a reader of more phlegmatic influence, Colin Jost, claimed he resided "in the hearts of children around the world," and read from scraps of paper in all sizes and stages of yellowing disintegration. Like the Philip Glass of comedy, Jost read off his minimalist creations which had been composed at random on subways and streets: Flow Chart: Bananas-People-Monster Bananas; a quote of Robin Williams's, "My comedy is like an emotional hang glider;" "This one was just something that I was excited about," he said. "Blockbuster, NO LATE FEES." Then, a slogan for shoes, "my feet, my life." "He was like a gay bar; dark and gay." Sometimes his deadpan delivery threatened to slip by, the audience, as if listening to new music, not sure when to clap, or in this case chuckle. Thankfully, Rich was on hand to provide his fellow SNL writer with peals of laughter as cues to usher in the novices and when he did, laughter was proven to be contagious.

Zach Kanin, the sanguine and fun-loving cartoonist for The New Yorker, anchored the evening with a reading from his book, The Short Book: Tall Stories, Freakish Facts, & the Long & Short of Being Small in a Great Big World. He started with ersatz testimonials from the book such as "I heard Zach Kanin is unstable," and "Before I read this book I was short-now I'm tall. You do the math." At one point the self-proclaimed "shortest president ever" of the Harvard Lampoon lifted the book and pointed to a picture of himself as a child to complete a joke and said, "a lot of what's funny is the illustrations; if anything falls flat it's probably because you can't see the pictures." He didn't have to lift the book again.

The writers of the Harvard Lampoon also included role-playing, rap and, like gracious guests, an improvised piece about their host, KGB in their repertoire.

After the reading Kanin said he painted as a hobby, "in oils; figuratively." The four former members of the world's longest running humor magazine gathered, their plans for the evening hanging in the balance.

-- Rozi Jovanovic

Elise BlackwellHumor and Baltica (Russian beer) flowed in equal amounts among the jeans-and-glasses wearing crowd at KGB on Sunday for the reading of Elise Blackwell and Porochista Khakpour.

Blackwell read first from her novel Grub about the publishing industry, which was based on the Victorian-ear novel New Grub Street by George Gissing. The intelligentsia at KGB were at attention, seemingly dazzled and shaken by her tales of writers’ woes. When Blackwell’s character, Eddie Renfros, angsty over the fate of his novel, finds solace among the “jean-clad and bespectacled” group at the “CIA Bar” with its “cold war era spy décor,” there was a bar-wide expression of conspiratorial mirth. Another character appears at a reading in a white cat suit and long black wig announcing, “I don’t want an introduction. I am an introduction.”

Grub is part roman a clef, with characters taken from Blackwell’s own experience while other characters are taken from Gissing’s earlier novel. Asked whether or not Henry Baffler, the character given an apartment by a mystery benefactor, was fact or fiction, Blackwell laughed and claimed it was both. The benefactor was taken from Gissing’s novel while, the substance of the character’s novels was based on the work of Blackwell’s husband whose own novel is forthcoming. Is it true, as one character laments, that there are no Max Perkinses left in the publishing industry. “It’s changed a lot.” Whereas editors and authors used to convene in private, these days marketers are a steady presence at meetings.

Blackwell, who earned an MFA from University of California, Irvine and was utterly earnest and likeable, said after the reading that what she found surprising and sometimes concerning were “the fates of different writers.” While she and other classmates from Irvine like Michael Chabon have been fortunate, some of the best writers from her program were never published. Still she expressed optimism saying that writers who persisted, for many years if needed, would ultimately succeed. Grub is Blackwell’s third novel in four years. Her first novel Hunger was praised by J.M. Coetzee among many others and was called one of The Best Books of the Year for 2003 by the Los Angeles Times. She currently teaches at the University of South Carolina.

Porochista KhakpourNext, the irresistibly quotable Porochista Khakpour opened her reading with a “preamble ramble,” about her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and read a weighty scene, which recounted the young character Xerxes’ experience on 9/11. After, Porochista announced she would read a sex scene, or one that came close: Xerxes having a wet dream about Barbara Eden. “I couldn’t even write a real sex scene,” she said. I recalled how she cleverly retreated from the subject in a short story published on Nerve, in which a college freshman, convinces his girlfriend that “biological sex is anti-progress,” and thus initiates a period of avant-garde experimentation in “no sex.”

Later, Porochista explained she was trying to keep the audience awake with the wet-dream scene. “At readings, I’m a disaster. I’m asleep like that,” she said and snapped her fingers. Her nails were perfectly manicured in white pearl. Her ennui isn’t limited to readings: Fellini puts her right to sleep, but films by Cassavetes keep her endlessly engrossed. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon? Charlies Angels? “Asleep in two minutes,” finger snap. Porochista used to have a white streak in her hair. People were saying, “who is this Susan Sontag look-a-like?” She dyed the streak chestnut brown. Not because of the comparison, but because she got bored of it.

What writers inspired her? David Foster Wallace. “I love him,” she said rolling her eyes. “I used to stalk him.” Porochista graduated from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars MA program, where she was awarded the prestigious Elliot Coleman Fellowship.

Raised by a Zoroastran convert and now dating a former Hare Krishna monk, Khakpour claims she’s not into the practice of religion, though she does demonstrate solidarity with Iranian-Americans. She recently wrote on her blog (http://porochistakhakpour.blogspot.com) a response to a negative review of her novel, a practice normally frowned upon in the publishing industry. Is she going to take it down? “Are you kidding?” She said. Feeling that the review was a personal attack, she had to stand up for herself and her people.

This is not the first time Porochista has shown conviction. Living on “canned food and ramen” while working on Sons, she could not afford the costs of photocopying the manuscript and asked a friend to do it for her. She said it was important to her to write a novel about the Iranian patriarchy and disabuse the public of false notions of Iranian women, as powerless “women in veils.” According to her, they’re the real force in Iranian culture. In homage to the women of Iran, Khakpour is currently translating the poetry of one of Iran's powerhouse poets, Forugh Farrokhzad, whose work she intends to make more familiar.

-- Rozi Jovanovic

Cafe Nueva York members Carmen Boullosa, Eduardo Mitre and Naief Yehya

For a few hours Sunday evening September 30, 2007, KGB became a little more like Café Tortoni of Buenos Aires as four distinguished members of the literary collective Café Nueva York read from new work.

Members of the collective, which has been active for one year, are all residents of New York who write in Spanish. One of its purposes is the creation of an “ambiance of critical sociability” that exists today in the coffee houses of Spanish-speaking countries and to resurrect the lineage of Lorca and Marti who both lived and worked in New York. Café Nueva York frequently holds public readings, like one held recently at the Museo del Barrio in which approximately thirty writers gathered to read in their native tongue, Spanish. When asked to give in her own words the meaning of Café Nueva York, Carmen Boullosa said, “it’s an irregular particular of New York.”

Essayist, writer and teacher Phillip LopateBolivian Poet Eduardo Mitre began the evening with a reading of poetry from his collection The Umbrella of Manhattan, his ninth volume of poetry. The Umbrella pays tribute to the urban anatomy of New York, as did the poem he read entitled Bryant Park, in which the narrator meets his lover in the park to have creation revealed to him under pirouettes of water and soaring sycamores. Other poetry was inspired by September 11, 2001 as well as abstract expressionist paintings. Is the umbrella a symbol? "Yes, it is," he replied. It symbolizes protection, but it also opens up to the world. Mitre has taught literature at Columbia University and Dartmouth College. He now teaches at St. John’s University.

Jose Manuel Prieto read from his new novel, Rex. He is the author of several novels, non-fiction books and essays and is also a translator of Russia Literature into Spanish. He is fluent in several languages having moved from his native Cuba to Russia at the age of nineteen. Currently Prieto lives in New York and is head of the Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute at Seton Hall University. He has been a Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers; he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s been praised by literary critics of The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Aleksandar Hemon called Prieto’s last novel Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire “an aesthetically blissful reading experience.” Did New York influence his writing the way Russia had influenced his earlier writing? "Of course, but I lived in Russia when I was young," he said. "Now I’m more—" and he paused for a moment thinking of the right term "—crystallized."

Serwah Asante, Nkiruka Nwasokwa and Erika Imberti; Naief Yehya and friends; KGB audience Leading Mexican novelist, poet and playwright Carmen Boullosa riveted the audience with the opening lines, “I’m not an expert on the subject of ghosts.” She proved to be just that as she moved from a contemplative philosophical tone, “the only ghosts that survive are those that prize something on our side,” to riotous, as when Octavio Paz inhales a ghost while hailing a cab on fourteenth street and is stricken with “poetic flatulence.” Boullosa has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, and a Distinguished Visitor at Columbia University and Georgetown University. She is currently a Distinguished Lecturer at CCNY. In 2002, along with fellow literary great Salman Rushdie, she founded a house for persecuted writers in Mexico City. She has published twelve novels, including her latest, The Perfect Novel (a work of science-fiction set in Brooklyn), which was published in Mexico.

Only a reader as hilarious as Naief Yehya could break the spell of Carmen Boullosa. Yehya read from A Stabbing Pain, a short satirical piece featured in the winter 2007 issue of BOMB Magazine. Yehya’s story is about a man who has a few months to live and whose lawyer, Matias Schmidt, tries to sell the rights to his death for $15 million. The audience broke into laughter when Yehya read “Not even an imminent death will eliminate ambition.” Naief Yehya, who looks like Robert De Niro but bookish, lifted his head to the crowd from time to time to appease the risible audience with a mischievous smile. An industrial engineer by training, Yehya is a journalist and critic of film music and culture. He has published several works of fiction and non-fiction such as Sanitary Works, War and Propaganda: Mass Media and the Myth of War in the US and his latest Pornography: Mediated Sex and Moral Panic. Yehya was born in Mexico City and came to New York in 1992.

After the reading I asked Mitre and Boullosa how often they met; if they thought Café Nueva York was at all exclusive to non-Spanish speaking people, if they felt that their sense of individuality might be lost in joining a group? Mitre drank some more of his drink. Finally he said, “You’re a question machine.” He seemed relaxed. “What do you do?” he asked me. He looked me in the eye. I closed my book, which was full of questions.

On June 2, 2007, the KGB Bar Sunday Night Reading Series hosted the very first reading from the long awaited THE APOCALYPSE READER, an anthology of new and selected short fiction about the end of the world. Edited by Justin Taylor, the book is now available through Thunder's Mouth Press. If you missed this evening, we suggest you check out the fun that was had here at the bar in the photos below and buy a copy of THE APOCALYPSE READER as soon as you can.

We thank readers Tao Lin, Stacey Levine, Jared Hohl, Elliott David, and Jeff Goldberg, all of whom braved the rain (there was rain that night, I believe) for a strong drink and the chance to deliver stories to a bar packed with attractive people eager to hear something new.
 

Get to know them:

Justin Taylor is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader. His story in the book is "Pole Shift," but there's a good chance that at this event he'll be reading on behalf of one of the dead contributors, quite possibly H.P.Lovecraft. His website is http://www.justindtaylor.net/

Tao Lin is the author of the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, the short story collection Bed, and the poetry collection You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am. His blog is Reader of Depressing Books. His story in The Apocalypse Reader is "i am 'i don't know what i am' and you are afraid of me and so am i."

Stacey Levine is the author of My Horse and Other Stories, and Dra--; her novel Frances Johnson was published last year by Clear Cut Press. She also wrote a libretto for a puppet opera about the Quileute tribes of Washington State. Formerly a creative writing instructor, she is now working on another book. Her story in The Apocalypse Reader is "Sweethearts."

Elliott David is a writer and artist; he lives in New York. His story in The Apocalypse Reader is "So We Are Very Concerned."

Jared Hohl was born and raised in southeastern Iowa. He lives in Brooklyn. His story in The Apocalypse Reader, "Fraise, Menthe, et Poivre 1978" is his first published short story.

Jeff Goldberg is a former VP of a Fortune 500 insurance company. He lives in New York City. His story in The Apocalypse Reader, "These Zombies Are Not A Metaphor," is a call for clarity and action in these troubled times.

ABOUT THE BOOK--The Apocalypse Reader collects thirty-four new and selected Doomsday scenarios: an enthralling collection of work by canonical literary figures, contemporary masters, and a few rising stars, all of whom have looked into the future and found it missing. Across boundaries of place and time, these writers celebrate the variety and vitality of the short story asa form by writing their own conclusions to the story of the world. Obliteration has never hurt so good.

Contributors: Grace Aguilar, Steve Aylett, Robert Bradley, Dennis Cooper, Lucy Corin, Elliott David, Matthew Derby, Carol Emshwiller, Brian Evenson, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Goldberg, Theodora Goss, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jared Hohl, Shelley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stacey Levine, Tao Lin, Kelly Link, H.P. Lovecraft, Gary Lutz, Rick Moody, Michael Moorcock, Adam Nemett, Josip Novakovich, Joyce Carol Oates, Colette Phair, Edgar Allan Poe, Terese Svoboda, Justin Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Deb Olin, Unferth, H.G. Wells, Allison Whittenberg, and Diane Williams.