Alina Simone’s kind of wonderful “Anatomy of a Breakup” is told through tweets and collages for the Twitter Fiction Festival.
Artist Vladimir Zimakov talks about how he made the jacket art for Alina Simone’s You Must Go and Win
A few photos from last night’s Letters in the Mail event at Housing Works Books. Thanks to The Rumpus for showing this FSG’er a fun time.
“I had several jobs. I was a crazy person – I had a full-time job and a part-time job, so I was working about seventy hours a week. I was a part-time vocational counselor at Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the country. There were about twenty-two thousand people that lived there, and there was one social services agency that was dedicated to it. They had funding for one part-time vocational counselor, and that was me.
“I also ran a program called Siberian Intercultural Bridges, which was an alternative to the Peace Corps. They sent English teachers to Siberia, and I actually went myself for a month. I just went on idealist.org, found this job and applied. I was trying to find a job that would send me to Russia, and I found one, but it was the most bizarre job ever.
“So I was literally running this small nonprofit parallel to the impossible task of trying to get very poor, very down-and-out people into jobs. It was manic, and then I completely burned out. I went to grad school mostly to hide and read. Writing papers was amazing.”
A couple photos from the Largehearted Boy 10th Anniversary Party at WORD. The lovely Emma Straub and Jennifer Gilmore read from their books; author and musician Alina Simone (doffing her “Secretly Ukranian” top) acted as surprise guest, singing a questionably traditional Russian birthday tune with accordion accompaniment.
Any literary event where attendees hold cupcakes in one hand and wine in the other is fine by me.
