Significant Objects tonight!
By:
July 10, 2012
WHEN: TONIGHT, 7pm to 8pm
WHERE: New York, at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway (at 12th St.), 3rd floor Rare Book Room.
Join HiLobrow contributors Luc Sante, Mimi Lipson, Annie Nocenti, and Jason Grote, plus Matthew Sharpe, Shelley Jackson, and Ben Greenman — as well as editors Rob Walker and HILOBROW’s Joshua Glenn — as they read stories from and celebrate the release of the Significant Objects book at New York’s Strand Book Store, on July 10 from 7 pm to 8 pm.
Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. The event will be located in the Strand’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street. Tell your friends!
Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. Sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination?
Walker and Glenn, that’s who. This book — 232 full-color pages, gorgeously designed by Jacob Covey, and packed to bursting with photos and charts and diagrams — collects 100 of the finest tales from their unprecedented creative experiment.
BEN GREENMAN is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and What He’s Poised to Do. His most recent book is Celebrity Chekhov.
JASON GROTE is the author of the plays 1001, Civilization (all you can eat), and Maria/Stuart. He also writes for film and TV, including two episodes for Season One of Smash. His upcoming collaboration with David Levine, HABIT, can be seen in the Alliance Française’s “Crossing the Line” festival in September.
MIMI LIPSON commutes between Kingston, NY and Boston, MA, where she’s finishing an MFA in creative writing this summer.
MATTHEW SHARPE is the author of the novels Jamestown and The Sleeping Father, among others. He has taught at Wesleyan, Columbia, and Bard.
SHELLEY JACKSON is the author of Patchwork Girl, Half Life, The Melancholy of Anatomy, and SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers.
ANNIE NOCENTI was the editor of Scenario, Prison Life, High Times, and an editor-at-large for Stop Smiling magazine. She is also known for writing comics such as Daredevil and Typhoid and now writes Green Arrow and Catwoman. She taught film in Haiti for 3 years and currently teaches film at the Indigenous Film Circle in Samiland.
LUC SANTE’s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings.
Here’s a Flickr video/photoset, a YouTube video, a Facebook photo album, a Facebook video, a Google+ photo album, a PDF excerpt download, and a PDF excerpt on Google Docs.