By Sarah Grothjan 7/17/12 3:20pm

The Pen and the Plate

Mr. Anderson reads an excerpt from his book, True Believers

Kurt Andersen and Meg Wolitzer Bond with Readers Over Dinner at New Salon

Wednesday evening, Alison Eighteen played host to 50 guests, hungry for Alison’s cuisine, full wine glasses and the readings from two authors, Kurt Andersen and Meg Wolitzer. It was the first installment of The Pen and The Plate.

The Pen and The Plate is a collaboration by Woodstock Writers Festival and Alison Eighteen, who aimed to create a literary salon series that brings best-selling authors to mingle with fans and read excerpts from their works during a three-course meal.

Martha Frankel, executive director of Woodstock Writers, said the idea to pair books with food came to her after learning that Alison Eighteen was opening a restaurant on 18th Street (after the close of her first restaurant on Dominic Street).

Six white-draped tables seated the guests, with an empty chair placed at each to accommodate the roving authors as they rotated from one table to the next. Feasting and conversation among guests was only broken between courses, when Mr. Andersen and Ms. Wolitzer sauntered to the front of the room to read aloud five-minute excerpts from their published works. Read More

By Christine Chen 6/20/12 1:50pm

the literary scene

The lady-filled crowd at the first annual VIDA fundraiser. (Photo: Jaclyn Rachel Green-Stock)

VIDA Supporters Party to Fight the Byline Patriarchy

It was a regular, quiet Monday night of muted jazz and pool games in most of the bars down North 11th Street. The red brick warehouse of the Brooklyn Brewery, however, reverberated with the chatter of a 300-plus crowd, gathered in support of the first annual VIDA fundraiser, sponsored by Riverhead Books.

VIDA, a nonprofit organization that supports women in literary arts, was formed almost three years ago to tally up the inequalities between men and women authors and poets. The resulting statistics, called “The Count,” shook the publishing world by revealing the low percentage of female-authored published work–The New Republic, for instance, only published 78 women overall in 2010, compared to a whopping 344 men.

It’s not surprising, then, that most of the guests at the fundraiser were young women. “It’s like a Mt. Holyoke mixer with Emerson boys,” Sande Boritz Berger, whose writing career spans the last four decades, remarked. Read More