It's a packed week for the bookish types, with a couple of our favorite love-to-hate-them New York novelists on the readings circuit. Yeah, we're talking about the Jonathans. On Wednesday (2/22) Lethem is hosting a short-story evening at Symphony Space (W. 92nd St. and Broadway), with stories by James Thurber, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges read by Malachy McCourt, Maria Tucci and Isaiah Sheffer. The show starts at 8PM and costs $21/25. more ›

Todd Zuniga, Opium Magazine more ›

In the Times' City section, there was a story by Thomas Beller about how his iPod fell as he was getting onto a train - slipping between the subway car and the platform edge onto the tracks. And so he went to pick it up. Oh, yes, he did:

I waited until the train and the two that followed it were finally gone. The iPod lay there on the floor of the tracks. The tunnel was dark and quiet. My knees were a little loose, like those of someone about to jump off a diving board. more ›

Disclosure: Gothamist started to read The Effects of Living Backwards (called a "mess - a goodmess, an ambitious mess" by the official Amazon reviewer) last fall but then realized our apartment was a mess so we tried to clean it and found that mix CD we got for our birthday ages ago, so we bopped around to that while we tried to organize our CDs but then This Old House came on, so we just watched that. more ›

Reading Thomas Beller's Newsweek essay about George Plimpton - part sweet remembrance of the man and part riff on the challenges of having a literary magazine, a la The Paris Review, or Open City, which is Beller's concern, we noticed a typo on his bio: "...Beller is the author of 'The Sleep-Overt Artist,' a novel..." which could very well be that title of some young literary hipster's book about a narcoleptic, but the actual title is "The Sleep-Over Artist." But we much prefer his short story, The Hot-Dog War which you can find on his site, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, if you check out stories for the Upper West Side, specifically 73nd Street and Broadway, or in his book of short stories, The Seduction Theory. more ›