Mellow Pages is a lending library and literary salon in Bushwick. Matt Nelson and Jacob Perkins are the co-founders of this cozy book-filled space, and they host established and emerging writers from all around the world. Tomorrow, with a reading from my forthcoming debut, I will participate in my first reading here.
The reading starts at 8, and will also include Richard Littauer, who designed the Mellow Pages website and will be reading from a novel-in-progress called Heraclitus; Charles Ozburn, who writes like a king and may or may not read from his thousand-page work-in-progress A Well-Spun Spoon (Of a Lark, a Lily & a Loon); Genna Rivieccio, my girlfriend, who will be reading from her novella You Into It? A Novella About Not Being Into It; and Montana Simone, who I have not yet met, but who, as a friend of Charles, I’m sure will fit well into our lyrical lineup.
A few months back Mellow Pages came under fire for telling the press that Exxon-Mobil was going to sponsor them for a year. They asked their fans what to do, only to eventually reveal that it was a big hoax. Personally, I thought it was pretty funny to watch people take sides with Mellow Pages based more on their personal politics than what might have been best for the library, and I understand the whole debacle as a kind of Duchampian 21st century performance art. Moreover, such a stunt represents the kind of place Mellow Pages is: one of free artistic expression wherein being afraid of how people will view you is not nearly as relevant as putting a message into people’s heads to make them question and re-think social norms.
So I’m not going to make any promises, but I bet that tomorrow you’ll hear some words that will put pressure on your current paradigm and help you appreciate the independent literary scene that’s emerging in Bushwick.
The post Mellow Pages Reading Tomorrow 6/12/14 appeared first on Daniel Ryan Adler.
