Hey! Tao Lin and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge are both reading in Baton Rouge tonight for free

Cover of Lin's Richard Yates; one of Berssenbrugge's meticulously rendered pages

Hey! Tao Lin and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge are both reading in Baton Rouge tonight for free at 6:00 PM at the LSU Museum of Art, on the third floor of the Shaw Center downtown. That's one one of the floors between the Manship Theatre on the ground floor and Tsunami up there on the roof. You can find it. You should go.

Normally I don't give over this blog's totally valuable real estate to unsolicited and uncompensated local PR but I'm very excited about this reading and think y'all should get y'all's asses over to it. I checked out Ms. Berssenbrugge's work, with which I was previously and woefully unfamiliar, on the YouTube and found her crystalline imagery cast in that calmest of voices beguiling. It's like a head of a dinosaur poking up through the placid water of a still lake and then slipping ripple-free back into the dark.



Tao Lin, I'm all about. I came to him thumbing through his Shoplifting From American Apparel at Urban Outfitters and enjoyed it on many levels, literary and contextual. When I read on his blog that he was considering doing a novella called Shoplifting Shoplifting From American Apparel From Urban Outfitters, I was hooked. I support fully this kind of thinking. I really like his latest novel Richard Yates, even more now in reflection than when I reviewed it. His deal is similarly soothing but is a cold balm. His dinosaur walks around the shore and fails to notice you and goes about its slow, singular dinosaur business and you sorta forget you are watching a dinosaur and wonder if you are not watching a reflection of yourself as a slow, methodical dinosaur in the sheen of the lake. His characters are also dinosaur funny and dinosaur cruel; not personal, but it's how it goes with thunder lizards.



Here's the Facebook invite thing. Thanks to Readers and Writers for putting this on!