April Lindner

New York's Washington Square Park by night I've been wearing grooves in the Jersey Turnpike lately, running back and forth to book-related events.  And the misadventuring continues:  this coming Friday (October 3) I'm Lawn Guyland bound.  I'll be reading a mix of poetry and prose at 7 p.m. at a coffee shop called Sip This.   The location is 64 Rockaway Avenue, Valley Stream, NY.   After that I'll be heading in the general direction of home to sign books the very next day (Saturday, October 4) at the Cumberland Mall in Vineland, New Jersey.  I'll be at the Books-a-Million from 2-4, and I'd love to see you there, Jersey friends! The glitzy interior of NYU's Bobst Library

View from the Highline, an elevated park in Chelsea In celebration of the soon-to-be-released paperback edition of Catherine , my publisher Poppy is giving away twenty copies.   Enter here to win!   Today I'm doing a little celebrating myself--of New York, the city that inspired Catherine .  But instead of paying homage to big iconic sights, like the Empire State Building, I would like to share a few smaller NYC moments,  for instance this chandelier at the Angelika Film Center, one of the world's best places to see an indie film: And this still life glimpsed at Peasant, a homey and delicious Italian restaurant on Elizabeth Street: And this still life, at the Union Square Greenmarket: Also glimpsed on Elizabeth Street: little girl plus even littler doorway equals an Alice-in-Wonderland Moment.   And this pause between phrases: keyboardist/vocalist/guitarist Michelle Casillas, at Bowery Electric.   (Bowery Electric was my model...

Glimpsed at Union Square On the day of my studio visit with Jesse Malin , I made sure to get into New York City super early--and not just so I could avoid rush hour traffic.  I had to do a little preliminary research for a project so tentative that I don't dare reveal even the tiniest details about it. My quest brought me first to the lower East Side and Strand Bookstore, where I browsed at length.  Then I wandered over to the Union Square Greenmarket, swooned over the produce, and annoyed pedestrians when I stopped to photograph it. Radishe Next stop was the Upper West Side by way of Grand Central Station: My destination?  Lincoln Center, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. After that it was time to hurry back down to Flux Studios for the tour.  But on my way there I had to make a quick pit stop for the best bialys on the Lower East Side: Of course once the research is done, the hard part begins: putting words down on...

To thank the fans who contributed to his Pledgemusic campaign and who have been faithfully awaiting his next album,  Jesse Malin  held a contest .  First prize: a studio visit. I entered the contest, and, to my amazement, I won .  If you've read any of  my other posts about Jesse , you might have noticed that I'm kind of a major fan.  So this was a huge deal.  Wednesday morning--very early so there was no chance I'd get stuck in traffic and miss my visit-- I made my way to the Lower East Side, and, much later, all aflutter, rang the doorbell of Flux Studios. Jesse greeted me and gave me a quick tour of the studio.  Then we sat down in the  mixing room with multi-talented musician Derek Cruz and engineer Brian Thorn.  The three of them were fine-tuning a song called "Stay Clean," listening to several different versions, trying to settle on a favorite.  Did it sound better with the background vocals punched up?  Shou...

New York City plus a legendary nightclub.... ...plus a touch of this: equals: Which is all just my way of saying t hanks to the lovely book blog I Swim For Oceans for this  recent review  of  Catherine.   

Kelly Hadden, Self Portrait Today I talk to photographer Kelly Hadden about her cityscapes, and the relationship between her love of literature and her photography. AL: Your cityscapes of New York are really distinctive. What do you look for when you’re shooting in the city? KH:  They are? Thank you. That's a huge compliment. Especially since I'm really trying to do more street photography and know how much more I have to learn. But I do what I tend to do in every aspect of any artwork I'm working on, which is to just go with my gut. I don't know if what I see is anything special to anyone else, but if I am excited by something, not so different than in shooting people, if what I see through my lens makes me feel something that excites me (whether it's beauty, fear, or my favorite, when I can catch it, juxtaposition), I take it without thinking.  I've always said that New York City separates itself from all other citie...

Yesterday I popped into NYC for a meeting in the shadow of the Flatiron building.  I've got a special fondness for the Flatiron, in large part because of a cameo appearance it makes on my novel Catherine: Cameos aside, though, the Flatiron is poetry in limestone (and glazed terracotta, according to Wikipedia ).  Apart from being one of the world's most iconic buildings and one of lower Manhattan's first skyscrapers, it serves as home to Macmillan Publishers Ltd.  Its "point" offices have a killer view of the Empire State Building.  And the phrase "23 Skidoo" was apparently inspired by freakish air currents the building creates on 23rd Street.  Something to do with women's skirts getting blown unexpectedly up...again, according to Wikipedia. Anyway, something really cool is going on right now inside the Flatiron, as I discovered yesterday.  If you should find yourself in the neighborhood, get right up close to...

This summer, Andre and I paid a visit to the 9/11 Memorial, to see the scars in the earth paved over, sculpted into something solemnly beautiful. I was grateful to see how the footprints of those massive towers had been respected, how the twin fountains manage to convey loss, immensity, mystery, and reverence for the many whose lives were taken that day. The urge to turn pain and disaster into art is deeply human and, I think, necessary.  We want to make some kind of sense out of the senseless.  To come to terms.  But that act of paving over, puts us at a remove from the thing itself. The monument or photograph or poem can't help but obscure the event it commemorates, at least a little bit.  Maybe that's a blessing.  Or maybe it's a curse--the curse of distance.  Of time.  Of moving on. 

Imran Quereshi's roof garden installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art  Feeding your head, the painter Jim Mullen used to call it back when we were in college together.  By "it" I mean the crucial down time all artists need.  It's not a good idea to spend all your spare time in a room alone making art.  Whether you're a writer, a painter, an actor, a guitar player, a crucial part of the process is feeding your head: reading, seeing art, being in the world.  Though the phrase has echoes of Jefferson Airplane's song White Rabbit and the sixties drug culture, I'm using it here the way Jim was using it back then--to describe those moments of down time that stimulate the artist, that give him or her ideas, refilling the fuel tank. For me, the best way to feed my head is to wander around a city--preferably Manhattan, where art can be found in almost any direction, and where in the course of walking on almost any block you can hear overhear conversa...

One of the most enticing things about writing fiction--especially a novel--is creating and inhabiting an imaginary world, walking its streets, and getting to know the characters that wander through it.  One of the most unexpectedly wrenching things about finishing a novel is saying goodbye to that world, those streets and characters.   Last weekend, when my husband Andre and I took a brief vacation to New York City, it was a little like stepping back into the world of Catherine , my novel that was published last January.   Catherine is set on the Bowery and in Chelsea--in fact, one of its narrators is even named Chelsea, after the neighborhood her mother loved and left behind.  So going back there, peeking into the window of Chelsea Guitars and pausing in front of the Chelsea Hotel, feels like a homecoming.  Here are a few random snapshots from this weekend: Breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien Quickie Mart flowers Mural on the corner ...