When I get this blog a little further along, I will be doing more with this space than just plugging my own appearances, book tour, parties, readings, etc. But for now – plug, plug, plug – come see my first reading Tuesday, April 29 7-9 at KGB Bar with two other Xer-authors:
Sonic Youth, Slackonomics and Gen X, all grown up at KGB Non-Fiction with Lisa Chamberlain, Jeff Gordinier and David Browne
FREE
SLACKONOMICS is a wide-ranging, smart and entertaining portrait of a generation living in an era of economic insecurity, technological revolution and flourishing creativity. Through a sharp and entertaining mix of pop and alt-culture, personal narrative and economic analysis, author Lisa Chamberlain shows how Generation X has survived and even thrived in the era of creative destruction, but will now be faced with solving economic and environmental problems on a global scale. Lisa Chamberlain is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the Executive Director of the Forum for Urban Design.
Jeff Gordinier is the Editor-at-Large at Details magazine and a regular contributor to PoetryFoundation.org. His work has been included in anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Best Food Writing 2006, and Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 1. His first book is X SAVES THE WORLD: HOW GENERATION X GOT THE SHAFT BUT CAN STILL KEEP EVERYTHING FROM SUCKING. Jammed in between the garish showboating of the baby boomers and the tabloid-trash stunts of the millennials, the discerning generation that gave us Yahoo and Nirvana has been quietly and inexorably changing the face of American culture. The men and women who came of age in the era of Lollapalooza have been underrepresented for too long in pop sociology, but reporter and essayist Jeff Gordinier argues that it’s time for the slackers to rise up and take charge.
David Browne is author of DREAM BROTHER a dual biography of Jeff and Tim Buckley. The former music critic of Entertainment Weekly, he contributes to the New York Times, the New Republic, Spin, the Huffington Post, and other outlets. He is based here in NYC. GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY is a detailed, extensively reported biography of the influential band Sonic Youth, complete with new interviews with the band members and roughly 100 friends and family members.
Media Bistro’s Galley Cat had a little item about my book and another Gen X book that came out last month, X Saves the Day by Jeff Gordinier (who I will be reading with at KGB Bar on April 29). We ate a rather fancy lunch at Savoy on Media Bistro’s tab, so I guess being a broke writer does have its perks once in a blue moon.
A quote from the item:
“I didn’t want to sound whiny,” Chamberlain says of her handling of the economic crises Generation X has faced; instead, she focuses on how growing up under such conditions has provided her peers with “a unique skill set to deal with big problems.”
See the whole thing here (including a dorky photo).