So we all know that Tony is the Events Guy and so it's really his place to tell you about fantastic author readings and not mine. I'm supposed to ramble about the exciting new books coming down the pike and what I'm reading. But I can't help it! We had two fantastic events on one night last week (this happens with alarming frequency, actually). And conveniently I wanted to talk about both of the books, so really it's just like my usual thing except it's just framed by these events. I won't talk about any upcoming events if that helps. I'll just talk about this Olsson's double-header last Thursday night.

Picture it - a beautiful Thursday evening. The weather is lovely, the birds are chirping, the spring air is heavy with allergens. It's Thursday night and the work-a-day crowd is starting to get restless. No, it's not Friday night, there will be no dancing until the break of dawn, no cavorting down the usual avenues of debauchery. But it's almost Friday, surely they can have some fun and still be presentable at work Friday morning. Right? Well, if you went to either the Irvine Welsh or the Elizabeth Hand reading you had a shot at it.

Up in the sleepy neighborhood of Columbia Heights under the shadow of the soon-to-be Target there's a little neighborhood bar called the Wonderland Ballroom. Tony and I schemed and plotted and figured out a way to have an author reading at this very establishment. Our guest was Irvine Welsh author of The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. You might remember him from such books-turned-into-movies as Trainspotting. But he's been writing at a steady clip producing many other fine books. Bedroom Secrets is the grotesque and tragic story of two frienemies and their boozy and masturbatory exploits. Up at the Wonderland with everyone all settled in, Mr. Welsh spat and burred into the microphone warming the hearts of the 100 person audience with his secretion heavy prose.

Meanwhile down on 7th Street at the Olsson's - Lansburgh a different evening was shaping up. Elizabeth Hand read from her new novel Generation Loss. This is a dark and devastating book about a walking train-wreck who forfeited her chance at greatness and has been stumbling through life ever since. A photographer herself, she's given an assignment up in rural Maine to interview a reclusive photographer and is drawn into some mysterious goings on. The locals up in Maine are drawn from the same bleak pen that Hand uses to describe the punk beginnings of the main character Cass Neary. Hand's reading drew quite a crowd and her prose is both unnerving and exhilarating.

Two rapt audiences in two happening neighborhoods on one spring night! (If only I could figure out how to be in two places at once.) This is what Thursday nights are all about... literary benders! Or at least that's what I'm advocating.