Last night, The Observer headed to Park Avenue for a cocktail party. This wasn’t a spontaneous affair, but rather a fête for intrepid author Michael Gross in celebration of his new book Unreal Estate. While the party was not at 740 Park, the building Mr. Gross fetishized in a previous book, it was just a few blocks south of that towering edifice of wealth—which surely pleased the author.
We entered a lavish spread, Read More
Paul LaFarge’s new novel, Luminous Airplanes, is both a regularly formatted novel and an online “hyperromance” (for more on what that means read the history he just wrote over at Salon). For his book party then, he decided he couldn’t just have cheese cubes, wine and the usual sidelong glances and gossip. Instead he organized a participatory experience of his work that was something between a haunted house and a contemporary art installation. Read More
There’s a cautionary essay by the novelist Alex Shakar up at The Millions about all the ill-fated events that befell him after his first novel, The Savage Girl, got a giant advance a little over ten years ago. First Robert Jones, his beloved editor at HarperCollins, died of cancer at the age of 47. Read More
“The classy New York Observer!” James Franco, said to us as we approached, that disarming smile of his going on all cylinders. Then, perhaps joking, he sneered, “I’m sure you’re going to say some nice things.”
It was last Thursday and we were at The James, a new hotel in the southwest corner of Soho, Read More
