“Because you’re here,” said Brooke Geahan, standing in a red-tinted room within the maze of the McKittrick Hotel. “Because you’re here now, you’re part of the special people.”
Geahan, doyenne of New York’s swank literary shindigs, was addressing a few dozen good-looking creative types sitting at café tables and sipping champagne, all a little unsettled by the haunted feel of the film noir 1930s parlor. The Chelsea hotel had been dormant for decades before being revived last year as the venue for “Sleep No More,” the blockbuster interpretation of “Macbeth” that invites the audience to directly participate in the play. And now it would play host to the first night of “The Forgotten,” a series of irregular hush-hush salons put on by Booktrack, Geahan’s tablet app that provides soundtracks for e-books.
“And please do help those who are hobbled,” Geahan said. Brooke Shields, sitting down below, laughed — she was still toting around the cane that she debuted at last week’s Met Ball (the actress tore her meniscus).
With that, Geahan welcomed to the stage the novelist Jay McInerney, who had written a new short story, “Solace,” for the occasion. He would be interviewed by Christopher Bollen, a young writer with a new novel, “Lightning People,” that’s lodged him in the set of McInerney acolytes.
“I think I’ve told you this before,” Bollen said, “but you’re one of the reasons I moved to New York, reading your books when I was a teenager…”
“I should be getting a tax break for this!” McInerney said.
They began to discuss the short story, which would be having its world premiere courtesy of a reading by the actress — and budding restaurateur! — Piper Perabo. It’s about a girl named Nancy, a New Yorker in her 20s who spends her Sundays looking for her name in the Times Style section. Then, after the events of 9/11, she finds herself seeking out random sex courtesy an all-hours bar on West Ninth Street.
For the complete article by Nate Freeman please visit Artinfo.