Doings and Happenings Around Town: Book Release Parties Edition

So I had the fun and coincidental opportunity to go to a Book Release Party for an author I had only just heard of for the first time earlier that same day. That day was today, also, as fact would have it, and today is April 26, 2010. I know my dates, see? The author was Christian TeBordo, celebrating the release of his latest collection of short stories, "The Awful Possibilities."

I wish I could elaborate more, but the sickening truth is I was agonizingly unfamiliar with the work of the entire lineup, from TeBordo on down. Adam Levin caught my attention, though, in part because he's a Chicago-area writer who teaches in the MFA program at Columbia College. I think I enjoyed his reading best, too, even though I arrived late and halfway through his story, and felt like a jackass as I waded through the ample crowd already in attendance. It was hard to find information about Levin because every time I googled his name, even with the variance of "writer" attached, the result was a litany of stories about or related to Maroon-5 lead singer, Adam Levine, which is a different name, Google, and people who link to Adam Levine articles and so forth who don't seem to know his name has an "e" at the end; it's a different name! Call yourself fans? (UPDATE: I've happily unearthed the title of the story that Levin read, "Important Men," and what's more it's viewable in full here at Guernica. Yay, everybody! Yay, right?)

Jeff Parker and Lindsay Hunter (not the former Chicago Bull, unfortunately, nor is there any relation as far as I'm aware) were also in attendance. Jeff Parker is a apparently a fairly up-and-coming writer of note, so suggests his Wiki (which the other authors listed do not have, that I could find). Parker's story was very amusing, although I continue being unhelpful at providing titles to the works read this evening. TeBordo's was about, to quote whoever described it in publisher press release, "a teen in Brooklyn, Iowa, deals with the fallout of his brother's rise to hip hop fame." Still, I can't recall the title of that one, either. My head was securely lodged far up my ass, though, so maybe that had something to do with it, hmm?

My apologies to Lindsay Hunter, whose reading I missed completely and therefore obviously can't comment on, but I'm always interested in reading new writers, especially females (as if my previous post were not evidence enough of that). And if she's a local, then all the better!

That's all I've got for now, but more to come about this and that and so forth.