Lit Bits & A Bit About Short Stories

• Chuck Palahniuk is in town tonight to discuss Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. I love this guy on a lot of levels - but here's why I probably won't attend the reading: every Palahniuk reading since Fight Club has been, despite his best intentions & my great hopes, smothered by Fight Club.  The fans. The questions. The gear. So many in the audience too-cool-for-school but also possibly violent under the surface.  One never knows. Which is a shame, really, because I'd like to go.  Will depend entirely upon my mood in approximately...four hours.
• The one, the only, Joan Didion is also in town tonight, but she's not free. 
• The week in readings is up at LAist, with Thursday getting a little out of hand.
• I said I'd cover short story collections for Short Story Month, but I must say that I just finished Steven Millhauser's story in last month's Harper's and -- wow. So dense and funny and different. So like Millhauser, but so unlike most stories I prefer. I like them spare, taut, crisp. He gave me something entirely other and I dug it.  If you have a Harper's subscription online, check it out here. If you don't have a Harper's subscription...what the hell is wrong with you? Seriously. The new archives have swallowed up whole sections of my life already and they've only been up for a few weeks. Less than $20, content easily worth five times that.
• The upcoming Pessl Roundtable is taking shape and I'm looking for contributors on both sides of the fence -- if you loved it or hated it (or half finished it or only read the illustrations) -- I'd love to have you participate. Drop me a line and we'll sort it out. I'll have some guidelines up by Friday with a view to kicking off the roundtable next week. (Go, hurry, read it now and then email me!)
• I have more short story collections than I realized.  I am almost (almost but not quite) ready to declare 2007 Short Story Year.  That's about how much time I need to cover them all at length.  With breaks in between, of course, to write my own.