McSweeney’s and Believer Magazine
Group Event

Hosted by Lawrence Weschler
author of Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences

Rich Cohen
Sweet and Low: A Family Story

Evany Thomas
The Secret Language of Sleep:
A Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions

Dustin Long
Icelander

Reading • Talk • Booksigning

McSweeney’s Literary Journal stands apart when it comes to cultivating hip new authors including: Evany Thomas, The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions; and Dustin Long, Icelander. Join these authors along with frequent contributor to Believer Magazine, Rich Cohen at this first-time literary event.

Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation.
With The Secret Language of Sleep, a couple can at last unlock the true meaning that lies within their chosen pose. All thirty-nine poses (including Classic Spoons, the Tobogganer, and Softserve Swirl) come with easy-to-identify illustrations, along with detailed descriptions, case studies, and training tips. Handy icons indicate which positions are most therapeutic for snorers, outdoorsmen, or couples who work on their feet. For the more adventurous, on the other hand, this book can be an introduction to dozens of fresh positions.
A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie; a madcap mystery in the deceptive tradition of The Crying of Lot 49; The Third Policeman meets The Da Vinci Code. Icelander is the debut novel from a brilliant new mind, an intricate, giddy romp steeped equally in Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue.

Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Machers and Rockers, and the memoir Lake Effect. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many other publications, and he is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City.

Photo © Sara Barrett

Evany Thomas has also written inspirational tag-lines for major movie posters, catalog copy for shoes and sausages, plus a variety of articles (covering everything from rare cars to soothsayers) for a variety of websites (including Television Without Pity, Webmonkey, Breakup Girl, MSN, and The N), plus her essay about female social clumping will appear in the upcoming Welcome to Wisteria Lane, a book about nothing but the television show Desperate Housewives. Evany was born and lives in San Francisco, and she has been through two earthquakes, one cuddle party, and a small car fire. There is also a website: www.evany.com.

Dustin Long was born in California in 1977. He spent his early years reading comic books and Twist-a-plots before deciding at the age of seven that he wanted to be a writer himself. To this end, he studied literature both as a student at UC Berkeley and as an employee in a used book store. After graduation, he worked variously building schools as a construction worker, moving boxes in a warehouse, and pushing paper for the government. He also wrote five novels in that time, Icelander being the fifth (though the first that was any good). He currently lives in Indiana with his wife, the folklorist Chantal Clarke.

Lawrence Weschler is the author of eleven books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent twenty years as a staff writer at The New Yorker before retiring in 2002; his work twice won him a George Polk Award, and he has received a Lannan Literary Award as well. Weschler has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, and he is currently the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU..

WORD FOR WORD is a Bryant Park lunchtime series presented in cooperation with Coliseum Books. Notable authors discuss their newest books at the Bryant Park Reading Room, alongside 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Following the readings, the authors will sign books, for sale on site from Coliseum Books.

In case of rain, this event will be moved to the Coliseum Books Café.

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