Wednesday Night on the Lower East Side: How to Be an Artist and Not Lose Your Mind Workshop with Master Lee at Bluestockings

(Video courtesy branekandi)

Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: Will Davies discusses "The Happiness Industry" at Bluestockings

(Video courtesy Verso Books)

Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: DarkMatter Rage (Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian) at Bluestockings

(Videos courtesy DarkMatter Rage; videography by Vicky Du)

Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: Julia Serano and "Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive" at Bluestockings

(Video courtesy Efrain John Gonzalez)

Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: Vittoria Repetto hosts Women’s / Trans’ Poetry Jam & Open Mike at Bluestockings

(Video of Zisa reading courtesy Truths89)

Sunday Evening on the Lower East Side: Anne Elizabeth Moore and "Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh" at Bluestockings

This evening we were at the wonderful Bluestockings bookstore for an event featuring a writer/activist we totally admire, Anne Elizabeth Moore, who read from her new book, Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, which USA Today's travel blog called "the best travel book I’ve read this year."

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Cambodian Grrrl is Moore’s account of teaching publishing to the first large group of social-justice-minded university women from the impoverished provinces of Cambodia, a country scarred by genocide and political repression.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a columnist for Truthout, and has written for The Progressive, Bitch, Annalemma, Tin House, the Boston Phoenix, and The Onion. The former editor of Punk Planet and the Comics Journal, Moore received a Fulbright to continue her work in Cambodia in 2010, and recently held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Her book Unmarketable: was said to offer “something distinctly more radical than merely protesting against consumerism: a total rejection of the competitive ethos that drives capitalist culture” by the Los Angeles Times; deemed “a work of honesty and, yes, integrity” by Kirkus and called “sharp and valuable muckraking” by Time Out New York. It was also named a Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones.

Anne spoke about her mission in Cambodia over the years and what she's accomplished and taught, and even more, what she's learned from the young women she lives with in Cambodia: really, the first generation of women who are empowered by higher education. She read several excerpts from Cambodian Grrrl, which is the first of a projected four volumes, and all of these excerpts showed her to have a first-class intelligence and sensibility, and she's also a fluid and graceful, if informal, prose stylist. Here's a version of one of the vignettes she read (richer with detail in the book excerpt we heard), which we've taken from her blog Camb(l)o(g)dia:

So Christmas Day I got up early and made the girls pancakes even though I’d been up all night puking because they love pancakes and it was Christmas and also because I would have just killed myself if I hadn’t done something. Although the night before I said the same thing which was how I ended up eating half a pound of malted milk balls with the girls watching Tum Teav, a very important Khmer movie, which was probably the reason I ended up puking all night. As it turns out, chocolate is hard for the body to process when you don’t eat it for a month. I never believed people when they told me that. Umm, and then I went shopping. Specifically, I went to buy all the Christmas presents for all the people I probably should have gotten them for before I left town, and I also went to pick up my handmade Apsara skirt, and while I was there some cute shopkeeper foisted some handmade green silk on me so I asked my tailor to make me a dress. I’m not going to tell you what this costs. The US residents will cry with jealousy and the girls will tell me I am stupid for spending so much, unless, as Kalyan says, the dress is VERY beautiful, in which case it does not matter how much you spend.

So, my consumerist duties fulfilled—and, honestly, after spending three days in bed, and musing on the role of the American in Phnom Penh today, I felt like a leech, also kind of a bad friend—the only thing I could think to do with the rest of my day was go to the Killing Fields.

Here is the thing that stays with me, that, I think, will haunt me: that the clothes that littered the site when the Khmer Rouge were killing people there in great droves of 20 or 30 per day—later, 300, when they could manage it (remember, they had to work at night so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, and you know what? They’re still living there, a short distance away, in fact about those between Starbucks in most US downtowns), the clothes that were stripped of victims, or fell off through more natural means, I don’t know: the clothes are still there. Not memorialized (although I guess some are, washed in 1980 because the smell in the stupa was overwhelming), but scattered throughout the grounds, mashed into the dirt, still peeking up near more recently excavated spots. Bones, too, but the clothes somehow are more jarring. They look normal, as if the grounds had been used as a schoolyard for several years and the ripped t-shirts and socks of playing kids had just been left in the dirt to amass, a natural aspect of the utilization of such an environment.

It’s true that people believe that the whole memorial is a bad idea, that it really would be best to chuck it, move on, close it. It is in the best interests of the Khmer people, they say, not to dwell on this. One of the documentaries I mentioned [HERE] here interviewed several Pol Pot regime survivors who still lived in the area who argued quite eloquently for the site’s closure.

And they might be right. There’s not much really to be gained from a genocide museum that can’t be gleaned from an after school special: people can do great evil for very little reason. We know this instinctively, and no amount of further learning, it seems, will compel us to find a way to stop it. At least, so far it hasn’t.

But there are so many things you can’t realize, that you can’t possibly understand about life under the Pol Pot regime and after it that they don’t think to explain. Things that offer small lessons in humane treatment, in decency, in how others stack their agendas. That the watery rice the lucky survivors who did get fed ate is in fact rice porridge, and it’s quite good. I’m eating it right now. But eating it without utensils of any kind? Eating it by the handful? Not an easy way to consume a thick soup, or a bowl of oatmeal. Even this small indignity, though, a lucky option. That the neighbors of Cheung Eck could be heard singing quite clearly, a few meters away, and that going undetected by them for several years considering the volume of work undertaken here is an astonishing feat. And what we learn from this is: to people who do harm to others, appearances matter more than human rights. And: small things hurt too.

Which is why Cheung Eck is valuable. But the urge to profit from the destruction, from the horrible fuck-ups of others who have greatly wronged you and everyone you know—this must be irresistible. I watch few bother to resist: the tuk-tuk drivers who gleefully offer a visit to the memorial as an option to golf, the young boy begging by first impressing you with his English and then asking you for money (How old are you? 12, he says. Where are your parents? I ask. We don’t have. Where are they? Killed by Pol Pot. Ummm, you’re a little young for that), the Japanese corporation JC Royal Co. Ltd that manages the site, extracting two dollars each per international visitor (few, if any, Cambodians visit. When I get home, I discover one of the girls in the dormitory has never even heard of it). And in the last year, visitors to the site have doubled, more a sign of increased tourism in the country than the supposed renewed fascination with the Khmer Rouge the Tribunal has supposedly elicited.

So. Someone profits here. Some merely survive, sure, but others, few, amass wealth and power from the suffering and destruction of many. Again.

We're looking forward to reading the whole book. Thanks so much to Bluestockings, which is undergoing an renovation these days and is temporarily without a cafe or a bathroom. But the books, and the great events like tonight's, are still there. If you haven't discovered Bluestockings, one of New York's most important bookstores, you need to visit one of these days.

Thursday Night on the Lower East Side: Emile Griffith, Ron Ross and "Nine Ten and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith" at Bluestockings

Last evening we went to one of our favorite bookstores in the city, the wonderful Bluestockings, to see the legendary boxing champ Emile Griffith and his biographer, Ron Ross, author of Nine Ten and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith .

We were 10 years old and in Mrs. Zweig's class 6-1 at P.S. 203 in Flatlands and have clear memories of the March 1962 title fight at the old Madison Square Garden between Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret, which was broadcast on NBC on Saturday night in an age when middle-class boys like us actually followed prizefighting (a word that now seems quaint). And we can definitely remember talking with our friends as we looked at the grim Daily News front page headlines in the ten days between the fight and when Paret finally died from the fatal beating at Griffith's hands.

Watching the brutal series of uppercuts Griffith delivered to a helpless Paret in the corner of the ring during the twelfth round will always be in our memory. What's remarkable to us know is that it didn't really diminish our boyish interest in boxing, which if anything, got more intense in junior high as we and our friends followed the heavyweight bouts between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali when he was still called Cassius Clay. And whatever horror we felt after Benny Paret's death didn't stop us from avidly following Emile Griffith's later bouts with Dick Tiger and Nino Benvenuti.

Of course the horror we felt in fourth grade when we angrily punched a kid in the jaw and he crumpled to the floor didn't last that long, either. (We got invited to the kid's bar mitzvah and invited him to ours even though we went to different junior highs so we stayed friends.)

So although the death of Benny Paret haunted Emile Griffith's career and he thought about quitting boxing, he went on after his three terms as welterweight champion to be middleweight champion three times.

But as his biographer Ron Ross said last night, the central question of Emile's life was: "I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. However, I love a man, and to so many people this is an unforgivable sin."

Even before Ring of Fire, the 2002 documentary film about Emile and the fatal fight, for years pretty much everyone knew the boxer was gay/bisexual and that at the weigh-in Benny had enraged him by calling him a maricón, as he had in the weigh-in before their previous bout. (Griffith had taken the welterweight title from Paret in their first match and Paret won it back in the second.)

Ron Ross, himself a professional boxer, fight promoter and manager as well as a novelist (the Runyonesque boxing-and-mob novel The Tomato Can), sat up front with Emile and Emile's adopted son and caregiver Luis. It was clear from when we walked in and saw Emile at one of the front tables drinking coffee that he has some form of dementia. He has that sweet, pleasant smile that we've seen in our mom with Alzheimer's. A young Brooklyn boxer we know who trains at the gym by Starrett City told us that he that he'd assumed Emile was "punchdrunk." Technically it's dementia pugilistica, made worse when Emile was nearly beaten to death leaving a gay club near Times Square in 1992. But he said hi to us with a friendly smile and made a playful pointing gesture with both index fingers.

Reading lots of little excerpts from the book, Ron told Emile's story, from his boyhood in St. Thomas - his large family struggled, particularly after his father left, and at one point he was placed in the care of a physically abusive relative who was so cruel that Emile sought and received asylum in a juvenile detention center. Here he is with his sister Joyce, whom he once carried two miles to a hospital when she had injured herself and was bleeding copiously.

In New York, he lived uptown and eventually got work as a stock boy at the hat factory owned by Howard Albert. Emile had no thoughts of boxing - at the time he had even tried his hand at designing some hats, which were good enough to sell well - until one hot day, he was working shirtless in the stockroom and his boss, taken aback by Emile's V-shaped torso (Ron said he'd then had a 44-inch chest and 26-inch waist) got him into boxing with the trainer Gil Clancy, who broke his rule about never letting a fighter in the ring until he'd trained for at least year because Emile was so skilled. He won his first bout without even having fully learned how to use his right hand effectively.

Ron recounted Emile's quick rise to the highest ranks of the welterweight division and also his first "serious life partner," Matthew, a kid around 18 whom he'd met when his father brought him to the gym just around the time of his third, momentous fight with Benny Paret.

In the audience were a mixture of Bluestockings' usual young progressive crowd and people from the boxing world like Daily News columnist Bill Verigan and Brooklyn's former junior welterweight champ Paulie Malignaggi.

Emile's story, as told by Ron, is fascinating. Emile, he said, has some records that will never be broken, like his fighting 339 championship rounds; he also has fought more times in Madison Square Garden than any other boxer.

Emile's greatest gift, though, maybe his talent for making and keeping friends, including his boxing opponents. Despite their three legendary battles, he was close to Nino Benvenuti and is godfather to Nino's son (as well as to Marvis Frazier, Joe Frazier's son) and many others; Emile was known as the Pied Piper of Chelsea for his helping out kids in the neighborhood. He also was always surprisingly open about being gay - as Ron said, he always walked into gay bars through the front door, not the back door. Here's a great interview at Dumb-Out.

We're looking forward to reading Nine Ten...and Out! and are grateful to Ron Ross for telling Emile's story and to Bluestockings for another memorable evening in their wonderful bookstore.

And we're grateful to Emile Griffith for his contributions as a boxer and human being. This video has the climactic scene in Ring of Fire in which Emile meets Benny Paret Jr. in Central Park and the two men spontaneously embrace:

Tuesday Night on the Lower East Side: William D. Cohan & "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" at Bluestockings

We've had two days off - well, except for grading and answering students' questions by email - as this semester's final final exams are coming up. The last two mornings we were sightseeing by bus around Brooklyn, taking the B61, B71, B49 and B41 through the borough after lingering over iced tea outside in front of the Starbucks on Montague Street and in the garden behind the Starbucks in Park Slope. We also were taking care of our eyes at Eyes on the Slope and our feet at Lorimer Foot Care so we can continue sightseeing during nice-weather days like the last two.

Tonight we took the L train two stops to First Avenue and then the M14A bus to Houston Street and walked two blocks to Allen and Stanton to one of our favorite Manhattan bookstores, the fabulous Bluestockings. We were lucky enough to hear a fascinating talk by William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. The Q&A period afterward was great, too.

Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review of the book:

Mr. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of "The Last Tycoons," a 2007 book about Lazard Frères & Company, gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm.

He shows how quickly rumors about liquidity led to a run on the bank, and how fears that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns could wreak fiscal havoc around the world led the Federal Reserve to approve a $30 billion credit line to help JPMorgan Chase acquire the ailing firm for a bargain-basement price. He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place: most notably the failure of two of its hedge funds, which were stuffed full with subprime mortgages, and the shocking irresponsibility of many of its senior officers, who failed to exercise oversight over the firm’s investments or wisely diversify its revenue. And in a kind of epilogue he gives us a brief glimpse of the fall of Lehman Brothers several months later, an event regarded by many Wall Street observers as the trigger to the current financial crisis, and the Fed’s decision not to give it a bailout or to work out a Bear Sterns-like solution.

Like Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker” and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s “Barbarians at the Gate,” this volume turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader. While the broader outlines of the Bear Sterns story will be familiar to readers from articles in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and a lengthy piece by Mr. Burrough in “Vanity Fair,” Mr. Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command, and he fleshes out the timeline of the firm’s calamitous final week with myriad new details and recent interviews with some of the firm’s principals, including its flamboyant chairman and longtime chief executive, Jimmy Cayne, who often seemed more interested in playing golf and attending bridge tournaments than in tending to his company’s business.

There was a nice-sized crowd in the folding chairs tonight, although the very prosperous people with expensive hairstylings and lots of gold jewelry in the rows in front of us looked more Upper East Side than Lower. But it's exciting to see diversity among humans as well as among canines at Bluestockings, and we noted that they were generous when the can was passed around for the usual donations to keep great events like this one going. And they also bought books. Without rich people, Manhattan would be a poorer place.

Camilla, one of the Bluestockings collective members, began her introduction of William by saying he was so accomplished she had to write it down and then read from a paper that he was an award-winning investigative journalist in Raleigh who worked on Wall Street for seventeen years, including six years at Lazard Frères and more time as a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. We were most impressed that she called William "an adviser to Jon Stewart":

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
William Cohan
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Actually, William didn't write a word about Bernie Madoff in House of Cards, but as he told us, "who's gonna contradict Jon Stewart"?

Instead of giving his usual overview of the book's story about Bear Stearns and how we got into our current financial disaster, William tailored tonight's talk to Bluestockings' progressive, feminist audience. He spoke, with only occasional glances at one sheet of paper, about the role of women in the Wall Street debacle. He then said, "Women had no role in this," and then jokingly added, "All the men can leave now."

William said that during his 17-year tenure on Wall Street he marveled at the terrible way women were treated in a Darwinian, testosterone-driven culture where alpha males were overwhelmingly dominant. In his first book, The Last Tycoons, Chapter 14 is titled "It's a White Man's World." It reports on the imported French attitude of Lazard Frères partners from Andre Meyer to Michel David-Weill and Felix Rohatyn to extramarital liaisons and the constant propositioning and near-rape of the few women who worked there. An employee like Kate Bohner - ex-wife of Michael Lewis, current squeeze of married Google CEO Eric Schmidt - was "catnip" to them. William said Bohner admitted to having affairs with just about every male executive at Lazard except himself.

At Bear Stearns, the treatment of women was no better. Misogynistic CEO Jimmy Cayne apparently liked mid-afternoon assignations in his office with light-blocking shades and windows as much as he preferred playing bridge and golf to minding the company's disastrous hedge funds and other misadventures. Cayne apparently hated his mother and oldest daughter and stopped speaking to both. With over 14,000 employees, Bear Stearns had exactly zero women on its executive committee and only a handful of females had any real power at the firm.

Again and again, according to William, smart and capable women were forced out or demoted at the whims of the masters of their universe who didn't like any employee making Forbes' list of influential Wall Street women: Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley, Sallie Krawcheck at Citigroup, Erin Callan at Lehman Brothers. William said that women typically are saddled with the blame despite having little or no responsibility.

William brought up the case of the courageous and prescient Brooksley Born, who as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the late 1990s called for government regulation of derivatives, what Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction." Born was ignored, scorned and ridiculed by Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan but if she had carried the day, the calamities of 2008 might have been avoided. As William pointed out, Born's final vindication came today when the federal government announced a years-overdue plan to regulate credit-default swaps and other derivatives that have caused such havoc.

If more women had been in charge in the financial world's corridors of power, is it possible the meltdown wouldn't have happened? William merely was raising the question, but he noted that JP Morgan Chase, one of the firms left fairly unscathed by the crisis, has the best record on hiring women, with 12 out of 56 senior management positions held by women like Ina Drew and Heidi Miller. (On the other hand, he said Goldman Sachs has also prospered in adversity, and it doesn't have a single female executive.)

William said it was great that we have three powerful, competent and smart women regulators right now:

Mary Schapiro, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who as an SEC member under the hapless do-nothing Chris Cox, tried to get more effective enforcement of Wall Street;

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and expert on what bankruptcy does to American families, who's heading Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) oversight;

and Sheila Bair, chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Committee (FDIC), one of the first government officials to recognize the problem of subprime loans and one of the few regulators from the Bush administration to come out of last fall's market crisis with an enhanced reputation.

The question-and-answer period lasted even longer than William's talk but was just as interesting. He talked more about the subject of House of Cards and the weird personalities at the top of Bear Stearns, the vain and foolish Ace Greenberg and the self-promoting, clueless, lazy Jimmy Cayne, who vigorously objected to William's saying Cayne "maneuevered" his way to the top.

Imitating Cayne's dese-and-dose outer-borough-gangster accent, William reported that Jimmy kept yelling, "What is dis maneuevered? I didn't maneuever!"

Finally William asked Cayne what word he should have used. The man CNBC named one of the "Worst American CEOs of All Time" immediately said:

"I would have preferred ascended."

Other questions involved William's own transformation from journalist to his years working on Wall Street (he immediately was making ten times the money he did as a reporter in Raleigh); his view of the culture he experienced at Lazard Frères and JP Morgan Chase (pretty acerbic: "The only good day of the year is the day you get your bonus"); and others that elicited articulate and interesting responses that shed light on how Wall Street, and the U.S., got into the current mess.

We asked William if, given all we know know, the Wall Street culture has really changed or whether the masters of the universe view the present time as a blip. He said most people in power in investment banking and finance want things to go back to the way they were, for the simple reason that they made tons of money then. That's why they're trying to get so hard to get out of TARP funding and the regulation that goes with them. As long as the corrupt compensation system continues, and the powers-that-be fund the campaigns of Congressional leaders and there's a revolving door between the highest levels of Wall Street and government, little may change once the crisis eases.

That was a depressing note, but we're looking forward to reading House of Cards and what the Los Angeles Times called its "day-by-day, conversation-by-conversation account of a financial debacle equivalent to the failure of Credit Anstalt, the Vienna bank whose default signaled the globalization of the Great Depression."

Our dad in Arizona said that when he first got the book from the library, he thought, "How am I going to read these many pages about Bear Stearns?" But he said, "I couldn't put it down. It may be the best book I've read this year." And he reads a lot of books.

We're grateful that a journalist and storyteller like William D. Cohan is both insider and outsider enough to give us an account of our current tragicomedy and we're grateful, as always, to Bluestockings for lots of food for thought. (Their free trade cafe has tasty stuff, too.)

Saturday Night on the Lower East Side: Randa Jarrar & "A Map of Home" at Bluestockings

After teaching our always enjoyable creative writing and short story classes for Borough of Manhattan Community College's weekend program on the Brooklyn College campus (thirty-nine years after we started our own undergrad career there), we were lucky enough to be able to brave Tropical Storm Hanna to see Randa Jarrar at our favorite radical feminist bookstore, Bluestockings, on the Lower East Side, and hear her read from her fabulous new novel, A Map of Home, of which Publishers Weekly said in a starred review:

Jarrar's sparkling debut about an audacious Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt and Texas is intimate, perceptive and very, very funny. Nidali Ammar is born in Boston to a Greek-Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father, and moves to Kuwait at a very young age, staying there until she's 13, when Iraq invades. A younger brother is born in Kuwait, rounding out a family of complex citizenships. During the occupation, the family flees to Alexandria in a wacky caravan, bribing soldiers along the way with whiskey and silk ties. But they don't stay long in Egypt, and after the war, Nidali's father finds work in Texas.

At first, Nidali is disappointed to learn that feeling rootless doesn't make her an outsider in the States, and soon it turns out the precocious and endearing Arab chick isn't very different from other American girls, a reality that only her father may find difficult to accept. Jarrar explores familiar adolescent ground—stifling parental expectations, precarious friendships, sensuality and first love—but her exhilarating voice and flawless timing make this a standout.

The MTA's weekend advisory told us the F train wouldn't be stopping at 14th Street, so we got off the L train at First Avenue and figured, since the rain had let up, that we could walk the sixteen blocks south to Bluestockings, which is on Allen Street (the continuation of First) near Stanton. Get there if you haven't for lots of cool books you will not find at any other New York bookstore, amazing radical T-shirts and other stuff, and good coffee and a place to hang out.

Unfortunately, it began to rain as we approached 12th Street and by St. Marks Place we were in a downpour. Despite our umbrella, we were kind of drenched when we got to Bluestockings, but luckily, Randa hadn't started reading yet.

We had never met her, but we have emailed after enjoying her work online, starting with her story "You Are a 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Has Just Moved to Texas," which won the Million Writers Award, StorySouth's prize for the best online fiction of the year, in 2004. Originally published online at Lee Klein's classic webzine Eyeshot, it's a terrific story, one we've taught to students at a Jewish high school and in a university class in immigrant lit.

(Intrusive and obnoxious local self-promoting aside: our story "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn" was a finalist for the Million Writers Award the next year. It's in a Dumbo Books book. End of commercial interruption.)

Randa also writes the spicy blog Rockslinga. Here's her official bio:

Randa Jarrar was born in Chicago in 1978. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved back to the U.S. at thirteen. She is a writer and translator whose honors include the Million Writers Award, the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Award and the Geoffrey James Gosling Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares as well as in numerous journals and anthologies. Her translations from the Arabic have appeared in Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers; recently, she translated Hassan Daoud’s novel, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Lots of other friends and lit-lovers came in out of the rain earlier tonight to see Randa at Bluestockings. She began by thanking her sister and brother and her agent Jin Auh, who were in the front row, and also thanked her publisher, Other Press, for making things happen "beyond my wildest dreams." A Map of Home also just sold paperback rights to Penguin!

Reading an excerpt from near the novel's end, when Nidali, the protagonist, is preparing her statements of purpose for her college applications. Her father forces her to write numerous compositions which he wants to be celebrations of her Arab heritage. Randa then read some of Nidali's essays, which diverge wildly and hilariously from her baba's intentions and expectations. (Maud Newton has the whole excerpt here.) The voice is sharp, funny, refreshingly vulgar and energetic. Frankly, our mind wanders at most readings, but when hearing this -- and the demanded encore, the start of the novel that wryly details the almost-slapstick comic events following Nidali's birth. Randa is a terrific novelist.

If you don't trust us (and we don't trust us either), how about this? Not only did Randa's book get a starred review in PW, but it scored one as well from Kirkus Reviews:

A first-time novelist offers a fictional take on her own complex heritage.

Nidali’s Baba is Palestinian. Her Mama is half-Greek and half-Egyptian. In addition to this mixed-up background, Nidali has an American passport and a precociously peripatetic personal history. Born in Boston, Nidali grows up in Kuwait, but her family flees to Egypt during the 1990 Iraqi invasion. By the time she lands in Texas, Nidali has become a seasoned traveler, and, wherever she goes, she carries with her a keen awareness of her inescapable difference. Nidali’s story is shaped by the harsh realities of ethnic division, political uncertainty and war, but it is also, essentially, a typical coming-of-age story. Jarrar is a funny, incisive writer, and she’s positively heroic in her refusal to employ easy sentimentality or cheap pathos. Nidali is a misfit living through calamitous times, but Jarrar understands that all adolescents feel like misfits living through calamitous times. The political is always personal for Nidali. For her, bombs dropping on Kuwait mean that nobody remembers her 13th birthday. As her family drives across Iraq on their way to Egypt, she writes a letter to Saddam Hussein complaining that his invasion has separated her from her boyfriend. And, ultimately, international crises have less impact on Nidali’s life than ongoing battles between her and her Baba on subjects like curfew and college. . .A coming-of-age story that’s both singular and universal—an outstanding debut.

If these two starred reviews aren't enough, this week's People Magazine gives A Map of Home four stars.

We're know you'll enjoy Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. And you should feel guilty if you don't.