the rutgers conference couldn't have been better! thanks to author lisa zeidner for inviting me. the students' stories were quite well done. and their fellow students had, what i thought, were spot-on observations. very supportive, eloquently expressed and well-informed. every writer's conference should be run so smoothly.

i hope my jew cents helped those authors whose stories i had last friday. and i hope everyone enjoyed last night's reading as much as i did. thanks for coming out in such large numbers and special thanks to everyone who purchased a copy of BE. spread the word!

ginormo thanks to lance polin for taking all the photos, here in the gallery. and for those who don't yet know karen karbo's work, you need to. she read last night, too, and knocked us all out of our tube socks. honestly. she's a wonderful author and a funny, warm soul.

in other news: elena mastromauro, a new BE friend living in greece, who's trying arduously to secure the rights for a greek publication, took a lot of time translating gabriele battaglia's interview with me for virilio.it. so more thanks are in order for her. you can read her translation HERE.

so my behind everyman tour is coming to an end for now. the last reading will be next week, june 27th, at rutgers university.

we'll be adding more dates in the fall/winter, but for now i've got to pack house and go about making the big move to LA. that's right! after almost 15 years in nyc, i'm headed west to seek out sunnier skies and more tectonic activity under larger fault zones. so if i post less frequently over the summer, well, now you've been warned why. and if i stop posting altogether, and you've heard about the "big one" on cnn or something, well...

but don't go removing this site from your bookmarks just yet. lots still to update:

the first of the interviews from the italian trip have come out. check out gabriele battaglia's interview in virgilio. you'll need to scroll down a little to pick up the interview. for those who don't read italian (me being one of you, of course), here's a hilarious, rather unintelligable translation courtesy of the good widgets at google. first person to translate the translation gets a free copy of the italian version of the book. (not joking!) on your marks, get set, go!

okay, other news:

my agent has sent my new novel, the pervert, the hypochondriac, and the feminist in to random house. now, the way it works is this: since they bought the first novel, they automatically get first dibs on the new one. then, depending on what they offer, and IF they offer, we decide whether to sign another contract or look for a deal with a different publishing house. so now it begins all over again. stay tuned for details.

lastly, but sooOooo not leastly:



i've got to plug a new book that a very kind someone at simon & schuster sent me last week. it's called three kinds of asking for it and it's just fucking fantastic! (note the use of the expletive in adjective form to denote just how fucking great this book is.) edited by susie bright, the book includes three erotic novellas by authors eric albert, greta christina, and jill soloway. and while all three stories are equally well written, and equally titillating in their own way, the soloway story is really what put me over the edge. you simply must read it.

written through the voice of a fourteen-year-old discovering herself and her sexuality, it brought my entire awkward early-teen years back to me in a blinding flash. i read the whole story in one hour, mouth alternately agog with amazement and flapping with laughter. dunno, maybe it's the raging heeb within me, but i connected on a deep level with her protagonist's (jodi klein) little cul-de-sac suburban world and the ways in which she struggles with her identity as a jew and as an early-teen. here's a passage about the holocaust that made me spit the dried fig i was chewing across the room:

"It happened and of course we should never forget. I mean, if that isn't the biggest DUH ever, 'never forget,' like we would? It's totally ingrained into us from like the time we find out we're Jewish. It's like, 'Hello, you're Jewish--by the way there was this freak who hated your ancestors and he killed six billion of them.' And of course at first you wonder, 'Why?' What was so bad about being Jewish that [Hitler] would have to kill us instead of move away?"

so the trip is over. i'll miss everyone so much! thanks for making it the best experience i've had since all this began back in january. in the airport, i stumbled across my book in the bookstore, right next to one about the new pope. the image of him on the cover, with his hands outstretched, welcoming our ogni uomo (every man) into the country made me smile.

more photos from the last interviews up now, in the gallery. and some of the dinner i had with my publisher, ornella robbiati, who is one amazing woman! special thanks to her for bringing me over, and for her deep interest in this uomo. until next time...ciao!

thanks for all the emails of support folks. it's nice to get when your luggage is lost and you're 6000 miles from home. i'm happy to report that the luggage was found and delivered today, all because of the "her"culean efforts of my publicist here, luisa colicchio, who aside from organizing the most interesting interviews i've had to date, also managed to locate the suitcase and have it delivered to the hotel. GRAZIE luisa. oh! AND, she somehow managed to get me a ticket to la boheme at teatro alla scala tonight! and it's opening night after the big restoration the theater has undergone. amazing! (see photos of the theater at the link below.)

so i need to get dressed for tonight, but i can't sign off without saying how inspirational the interviews were today. each and every one of them. first of all, they'd all read the book. i know that sounds silly, but it was clear that of the publicity i did in the states, few interviewers had actually read more than the back cover. second, everyone here asks MOLTO intelligent questions. that is to say informed questions that come from a deep knowledge of art, history, literature and music. i had questions today that made me think. that had me searching for answers and made me question my own beliefs and understanding of characters that i invented (!) hard to describe really.

but it was like the difference between these two questions below (you tell me which is from the states and which is from italy):

1) david, tell me, is it that your humor is influenced by woody allen or more that you and woody allen are both inspired by the same sources? say of jewish comedians like the marx brothers?

2) the blurbs here make you out to be funny. did you set out to write a funny book?

now do you get it?

more on that after tomorrow's long round of interviews. for now some photos.

not the best way to start the trip. especially in a country that judges you on what you wear. so i guess i'm going to my first set of interviews in my airplane clothes: jeans and sneakers...

on the plane over i wrote a new essay about my relationship with jazz guitarist pat martino. it'll be published here in a paper called il giornale. i'll post a link once i have it.

milan is gorg. but you knew that already.

lots of photos but no way to post them since the camera downloading doohickey is in my suitcase, which, for all i know, is in siberia (alitalia does fly there, you know).

first let me apologize to those who have written recently. it's not like me to take so much time in responding, but it's been a crazy run up to the italy trip with a lot of last minute preparations and work to be done. i will write back, just give me another week.

second, for those who can attend, i will be signing copies of ogni uomo at 6:00pm (18:00) on tuesday, the 14th of june at rizzoli bookstore in the galleria vittorio emanule in milano.

photos of this and all the interviews, as always, to follow.

there's been a lot of activity in singapore and china lately...but nothing i can put in html-stone.

what i can tell you is the hebrew translation is now complete. so we should have a tentative pub update soon.

also: i'll be going to italy next week in support of the italian translation. more on that as i have it. meanwhile, here are a couple photos taken over the weekend with stefano bortolussi, my translator, who was in town for BEA with his beautiful wife leeann. two finer people you could not meet.

for those who don't know, there's a site called technorati.com that tracks linkage on the web. by updating itself every few minutes or so, it does a good job of tracking bloggers, what they're blogging about as seen through the links they include in their posts. of course it's not 100% accurate because bushels of blogs are published every minute with no links at all.

but still, for people in the publishing business who want to track the hot books: who's reading and then blogging about what, the site is a decent weathervane. (in the BOOKS department, the site will only track links to amazon.com...something of nuisance, but whatever.)

soOooo, i've been looking at technorati for the last six months or so, waiting, waiting, wondering, waiting, dreaming, waiting ever so patiently, for BE to appear. and then, today, lo and behold...

beneath the new thomas freidman (see, no link to thomas freidman's book, so that book won't be counted on this blog by the technorati spiders), under the new harry potter, way down below the new nick hornby and old mitch albom (who, i recently learned, went to the same day camp as me), looming right after the ever-popular blogger book: the tipping point...(drumroll)...well, there you would have found behind everyman today. just *above* freakonomics (a fantastic book i can't recommend enough, hence the link).

seeing as only 30 books make the list, and seeing as every other book on the list is a best-seller or a book with a monster marketing campaign (or both, for one usually begets the other), i'm feeling pretty self-congratulatory tonight.

if you want to scroll through 'em all, you can check out the jpeg i saved of the webpage (as proof, 'cause lord knows if we'll ever make it again) by clicking here.