Lit Bits & a Bit About Heaney

• The now less-than-timely week in bookish events is up at LAist
• Walter Kirn is in town tonight, I'm not quite sure how the "discussion" will go as I've noted, but I'm up for anything that involves Kirn and an anthology from The Atlantic Monthly (am I the only one who seems to perpetually confuse The Atlantic Monthly with The New Republic? I know, not something I should admit to, but there it is). If only there were tickets available. I might just go and see if I can get in.
• Amy Hempel is reading from her Collected Stories tonight at the Hammer Museum at 7pm. If you can somehow make it out there, past all the insane traffic and the disgrace that is the Wilshire Corridor, you will not regret it.  I included Hempel's Reasons to Live collection in my must-reads for Short Story Month for a reason.  She's a fantastic reader & question-answerer to boot.
• Since we're talking of collections/anthologies, I feel I should state for the record that I'm intrigued by Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors collection of essays and one short story. Has anyone dipped in yet? Thoughts? I need to secure this pronto.
• Alice Sebold is on Bookworm today at 2:30pm to discuss her new book The Almost Moon.  Bring your patience to the dance.
• I finished The Almost Moon on the plane back from Ireland and...I'm mixed. I agree in part with Susan Salter Reynolds that the book is quite stylish, but that a lot of big questions are merely raised and never tackled. But some sentences are so lovely - so perfect - that part of me didn't care. My review of the book will be up on LAist Sunday as part of our new (ahem, if I can swing it on a regular basis) Sunday Book Review feature.
• And, call me an ass or just distracted on the plane whilst returning from my dreamy honeymoon, but I thought she was in the freezer.
• I'm devouring Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground collection of poetry. Many have said it before and I'll glom on to say it again: there is something divine in reading an author's work where it was written. Fields and plows and stone walls wouldn't be nearly as alive for me had I not spent two weeks driving alongside them. Walking through them and around them. I also feel I understand the Irish psyche (nay, my own family's psyche) in a way that tons of reading would never quite offer up. Much, much more on this to come.
• Plus Diaz. I promise.