Liz Moore Music and Books

Someone you should follow (my literary agent)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:53:02 -0400

Dear Tumblr friends,

Today I am pleased to introduce you to your newest Tumblr friend: my agent, Seth Fishman.

Are you a writer? Are you an aspiring writer? Are you an agent? Are you a reader? Are you an aspiring reader? Are you a human? If so, you should follow Seth. (Don’t follow Seth if you are a robot, however. And I know a lot of you are.)

Just look at this dapper man, with a dapper beer in his hand:

How could you say no?

Seth is not only a talented agent, but a talented writer. In fact, his first novel, a YA thriller called The Well’s End, is due out soon. Here’s the description:

Sixteen-year-old Mia Kish’s small town of Fenton, Colorado is known for three things: being home to the world’s tallest sycamore tree, the national chicken-thigh-eating contest and one of the ritziest boarding schools in the country, Westbrook Academy. But when emergency sirens start blaring and Westbrook is put on lockdown, quarantined and surrounded by soldiers who shoot first and ask questions later, Mia realizes she’s only just beginning to discover what makes Fenton special.

And the answer is behind the wall of the Cave, aka Fenton Electronics, of which her father is the Director. Mia’s dad has always been secretive about his work, allowing only that he’s working for the government. But unless Mia’s willing to let the whole town succumb to a strange illness that ages people years in a matter of hours, the end result death, she’s got to break quarantine, escape the school grounds and outsmart armed soldiers to uncover the truth.

By the way, Seth wants tips about about how to use Tumblr. So don’t just follow him—tip him. Right in his ask box.

A thing in NYC and a thing in Philly

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:20:00 -0400

Friends! Tonight I’ll be in NYC at Bill Cheng’s Brooklyn reading: http://greenlightbookstore.com/event/bill-cheng-alex-gilvarry

And tomorrow (5/15) at 8 p.m. I’ll be reading, along with Michael Heald and Nic Esposito, at the Standard Tap in Philadelphia. Come for the beer, stay for the….beer.

http://www.philebrity.com/2013/05/13/join-us-at-the-standard-tap-on-wednesday-night-for-an-author-reading-with-michael-heald-liz-moore-nic-esposito/

The best.

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:56:42 -0400

The best.

Today,

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:53:00 -0400

having completed a substantial piece of non-writing-related work, I am buying four new books and I intend to read them all greedily in quick succession and it feels like the best, most luxurious indulgence I have ever granted myself.

bycheng: Southern Cross the Dog is out today! Here’s Lightnin’...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:44:28 -0400

bycheng:

Southern Cross the Dog is out today!

Here’s Lightnin’ Hopkins, My Black Name

My friend Bill Cheng’s debut novel, Southern Cross the Dog, is now available everywhere. Get it if you like good writing.

Athenaeum Literary Award

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:55:00 -0400

I’m happy to announce that Heftis one of the winners of Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Literary Award. I’ll be giving a brief talk and book signing tomorrow night as part of the award presentation, which is free and open to the public.

Information here: “There is still time to sign up for the Athenaeum Literary Award presentation on Wednesday, May 8, at 5:30 PM. This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are requested. RSVP to Susan Gallo at 215-925-2688 or sgallo@philaathenaeum.org.”

(By the way….the Athenaeum itself is a pretty great place, and you should visit if you haven’t been! My first job out of college was in the Publications department of the Morgan Library & Museum; therefore, special-collections-libraries/museums are near and dear to my heart.)

Recent events

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:25:00 -0400

in my life have included

The Philly Burger Brawl (yesterday). Please note that it has been approximately twelve years since I have had any part of a hamburger, having first given up all meat at 18, then slowly reintroduced seafood and poultry. Hamburgers….are a different level of meat. But yes, I bravely had a bite of every one that M tried, and my conclusion is that I liked the toppings better than the beef. It wasn’t the violins-and-shafts-of-sunlight reunion that I have heard other former vegetarians speak of. So…probably no more hamburgers in my near future.

My personal favorite, above….Percy Street BBQ. It included an egg yolk and prosciutto.

And a close second…Barbuzzo. That cocktail was delicious.

Here’s an even more exciting thing that happened (and, upon saying that, I realize the extent of my agedness):

I went away for the weekend two weekends ago and when I returned M had ORGANIZED OUR BASEMENT COMPLETELY WITH THE HELP OF A LADY WHO ORGANIZES STUFF. It was a surprise. It was the best surprise ever. Now, a year and a half after moving into the house, the basement wasn’t totally out of control…but it was heading in that direction, thanks to a small leak during Sandy (during which we shoved every single box into a haphazard heap) and then the concreting of a basement crawl space (before which we moved said heap across the basement into a different heap).

Just look at this masterpiece.

(Oh hi, guitar that I now have no reason not to access/play.)

Every box is labeled with its contents. EVERY BOX IS LABELED WITH ITS CONTENTS.

Way to go, M. (Pictured here on our way to watch the Derby at a divey place on Saturday, just wearing his Derby hat for kicks.)

Several gold stars for him.

An interview with Jessica Soffer

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:47:07 -0400

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing my friend Jessica Soffer for The Tottenville Review. Jess’s debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, was published last week and is just beautiful. You should really, really read it.

In the meantime, here are a few select excerpts of our conversation, the complete version of which can be found here.

Congratulations, Jessie!

INTERVIEWER

In your novel you write about food with a sense of nostalgia and warmth and fondness. It seems like the antidote to suffering. Do you have your own fond, familial memories of food? If so, what are they?

JESSICA SOFFER

I come from a long line of people who believe in the curative powers of food. My father was born in Baghdad, Iraq in the 1920s and his mother was a healer. She believed in eating for one’s well-being, to strengthen and fortify and enrich the body by eating particular things. Iraqi Jews of that time also believed in eating by color: yellow fruits and vegetables for happiness, rose petals for love, shunning black and unlucky foods, such as the skin of eggplants. When my father came to the United States, he was forced to abandon his family, his Jewish faith, his national pride, and so food and the flavors of his childhood were the way he reestablished a home in New York, by replicating his mother’s recipes.

INTERVIEWER

I love this answer. I also see so much of that in you: your first question, every time I walk into your apartment, is, “What can I get you? Tea?” (I’ll overlook the part about how you then ask me if I want hemp milk in it, the thought of which chills me to my bones.) I think food, offerings of food and drink, are such a beautiful part of friendship. I think I have told you about how weirdly sentimental I get when people split fruit with me—like, “here, want half of this orange?”—because it’s such a primitive gesture and triggers some uncanny ancestral memory in my cerebrum, and it also speaks to the fundamental good of human beings. We humans have been splitting fruit with each other for millennia. I know some animals do it too, but we split fruit with people outside our family, or herd. This is not a question yet. I guess my question is, do you feel that way too? Do you offer food as a gesture of something?

JESSICA SOFFER

I have three things to say to that. First, asking about the tea has to do with you. How I want you to stay a while, forever, always. And tea is a good start. I keep ice cream in the freezer because I know how you prefer it not only to hemp milk, but to world peace, puppies and winning the lottery. Second, asking that question has to do with my childhood. My mother is not much of a cook but she is a professional at making people feel at home: sitting them down on the couch with a good book, tucking their feet into a wool blanket when she’s only just been introduced. My father was a more traditional in his home-making. The Iraqi Jews believed in being generous hosts: dried fruit and nuts for days when any Tom, Dick or Harry dropped in. Third, asking that question has to do with always wanting everyone to feel comfortable in my presence. If you get my name wrong, I will not correct you. I don’t want you to feel weird. It’s not a question of allowing myself to be walked all over—which I won’t allow—but with something that you and I talk about often: empathy. How some writers have it in spades (I’m not assigning judgment to that at the moment): they rely on it, are burdened and motivated by it, and it’s what allows them/compels them to write about people who are not themselves. That is the case with you and me, which means that we can imagine standing at the door awkwardly, not being offered tea. So we ask: tea, ice cream, a soft place to land?

From "Boston," by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:30:15 -0400

Yesterday was bad. Today is better. All friends and family in Boston are safe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was better at prose than poetry, but I thought this poem was appropriate:

SICUT PATRIBUS, SIC DEUS NOBIS*

…The sea returning day by day

Restores the world-wide mart;

So let each dweller on the Bay

Fold Boston in his heart,

Till these echoes be choked with snows,

Or over the town blue ocean flows…

And each shall care for other,

And each to each shall bend,

To the poor a noble brother,

To the good an equal friend.

 
A blessing through the ages thus
Shield all thy roofs and towers!
God with the fathers, so with us,*
Thou darling town of ours!
 
*The city motto of Boston

Days like these

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:39:21 -0400

are Pleasantville days: the cherry trees have finally burst into Technicolor. What a good scene in an underrated movie.

(image courtesy of)

togatherinc: Here at the Togather office, we’ve all been...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:13:33 -0400

togatherinc:

Here at the Togather office, we’ve all been reading books by Togather authors. Here’s our library outreach coordinator Dana Skwirut’s report on Liz Moore’s novel Heft, which makes us want to create a book club event with Liz, stat.

I’ll admit it. Heft made me cry.

It’s hard to explain why without embarking on a tl;dr journey that is ultimately too TMI for even my high school livejournal account, let alone a very public place like this. It’s also hard to explain without giving too much away. Also, I don’t even like admitting that it happened.

Heft is the story of Arthur Opp, an obese former academic who has not left his Brooklyn home in nearly a decade, and Kel Keller, an all-star high school athlete living in Yonkers. Kel is the son of one of Arthur’s former students, Charlene, who sets the story in motion by calling Arthur, who she hasn’t spoken to in nearly twenty years.

I really had no idea what to expect when I started reading Heft, and I certainly didn’t expect what happens or the effect it had on me, but Liz Moore’s characters are entirely relatable and live through events that are universally human. They remind us that even though our individual details are different, we are all still able to connect through shared feelings and experiences.

First, thank you so much for the nice write-up!

Second, here’s a cool thing for people with book clubs or other book-related organizations: Togather is a website that helps people coordinate with authors to do events. It lets you request an author for your book club, gathering, reading-at-home, etc…authors put parameters on the kinds of events they’re interested in doing, and…voila.

(I hope I did a good enough job of explaining that. You should probably just go to the website for a better explanation.)

I joined. You should.

New York comes to Philly

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:15:36 -0400

I have now been in Philadelphia almost four years. In some ways it feels as if I’ve been here for much longer—especially since we bought the house, it feels like home here—but in others it feels like a dream. Like two days since I’ve been here.

That is why it was especially nice to have three of my New York-est friends (and an honorary French/Washingtonian New Yorker) come to visit Philadelphia this past weekend for the first time. For one thing….the weather. Let’s talk about the weather these days.

This is my kitchen. This is me looking very concerned about something in my cabinet. This is Bergen photobombing me.

These are my friends. Aren’t they attractive? This is all of the cheese we bought from the Italian Market. Isn’t it attractive? (And some terrible, terrible strawberries. We couldn’t have known.)

This is the Barnes Foundation. We went there.

And these are fancy cocktails. And some of us looking quite serious.

In all it was an excellent excuse for some sightseeing and so, so nice to have a little piece of New York in Philadelphia, just for an overnight. Miss them already.

Unrelated Photographs of Recent Events in My Life

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:15:00 -0400

In February and March,

an important friend turned an important year, and

we tried Federal Donuts, and

some more important friends (the cuties in the middle) got engaged, and

I went to Boston for the AWP conference and it snowed a lot, and

I went to the Barclays Center for the first time to see a Nets game (and thought, “Holy crap, I’ve been gone from Brooklyn a long, long time,” and “How did this happen?” and “This was a train yard” and “This mac & cheese is delicious”), and

We took M’s Pop-Pop to see a UDel women’s basketball game, because he is Elena Delle Donne’s biggest fan, and on the way back we stopped at Woody’s Crab House in North East, MD, and he won a $200 gift certificate because he ordered the 2 millionth crab cake. Those are balloons that he’s holding.

It was the best day.

“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:23:00 -0400

“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”

― Chinua Achebe

(photo courtesy of the Africa Public website.)

A reading in Philadelphia

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:32:36 -0400

Despite the number of readings I’ve done, I’ve done very few in Center City, Philadelphia. (One, I think??) Tomorrow night, I am honored to be included in a sweet three-person line-up as part of the longstanding TireFire reading series.

The details:

Marie-Helene Bertino, Marcus Pactor, Liz Moore (<—when I am part of line-ups like these I wish for a more interesting name)

Tattooed Mom (<— a bar)

530 South Street, Philadelphia PA

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Doors at 7, Reading promptly at 8

Event website

I hope to see you / meet you / high-five you there!

The best thing

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:17:35 -0400

is when you see strangers smiling to themselves about something, some memory, some recalled conversation or joke. Maybe thinking about their crush. Maybe dreaming of an ice cream sundae, I don’t know. Whatever they’re daydreaming about, it’s making them happy, and they’re smiling to themselves.

If they accidentally catch your eye they will catch themselves, and drop the smile, and I want to say to them—keep smiling. Keep thinking about whatever it is that’s making you happy. It’s a cold March Thursday. Do what it takes.

Sometimes

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:57:02 -0400

I wish there were a reset button for our e-mail accounts that would automatically generate an e-mail to every person who’s ever e-mailed us. The e-mail would say, “Hi! Did I accidentally forget to write back to you three months ago? My inbox is the stuff of nightmares. Please re-send.”

The ghosts of accidentally unanswered e-mails haunt me in my dreams.

Yes, that is a big old picture of my face. The reason for it (so...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:20:00 -0500

Yes, that is a big old picture of my face.

The reason for it (so early in the morning) is because my friend Bill Cheng has asked me to participate in his most recent, very worthy venture: 90Outloud.

The concept, as described on the website:

“It’s called 90Outloud, and all it is is different people from around the world posting ninety seconds of their favorite passages.

That’s it.

Just 90 seconds. A paragraph. Sometimes not even that. Just a minute and a half for a snippet of book to come suddenly and thrillingly to life.”

(You can read more on the site.)

For my 90-second reading, I chose excerpts from the short story “Snow,” by the incredible Ann Beattie, from her collection Where You’ll Find Me, available here and elsewhere.

For those of you who like to read instead of listen, here are the two brief excerpts that I read:

You remember it differently. You remember that the cold settled in stages, that a small curve of light was shaved from the moon night after night, until you were no longer surprised the sky was black, that the chipmunk ran to hide in the dark, not simply to a door that led to its escape. Our visitors told the same stories people always tell. One night, giving me a lesson in story telling, you said, “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it” …

… This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It’s as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying “snow,” my lips move so that they kiss the air.

No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road—an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.

The whole story is worth the read—it’s brief and beautiful. One of my favorites.

And now, I’ll be over here in a corner, trying not to cringe at the sound of my own voice…

books: Are you coming to the AWP Writing Conference? Or do you...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:22:53 -0500

books:

Are you coming to the AWP Writing Conference? Or do you live in Boston and like reading, writing, and the internet? Or drinking booze someone else paid for? Let’s high five each other, drink cocktails, and talk about books! Please join Electric Literature, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Tumblr for a celebration of virtual friends and real world meetings at Sweetwater Tavern in Boston on March 7th.

I will be at AWP, and I will probably be at this!

Anyone else?

An exciting year for books by friends

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:39:00 -0500

Here’s what’s happening: all of my friends are about to publish books that you should add to your Goodreads lists immediately.

Yes, they’re friends, but no, I’m really not exaggerating about how good these guys are—I cannot WAIT to get my hands on the first published editions of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, and High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire.

The first two are coming out in April and May, respectively, and Scott’s won’t be out until close to 2014, but I like to get a jump on things.

To tide us all over until they’re out, here are some amazing short pieces they’ve recently written…

Jess had a beautiful article in Vogue last month:

Bill wrote a “Townies” column for the New York Times:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/bitter-sweets/

And, for good measure, here’s a recent, wonderful piece by a friend whose book came out last year. Alex Gilvarry on the joys and pains of the writing life:

http://www.full-stop.net/2013/02/20/interviews/alex/pathos-alex-gilvarry/

I’m so proud of these guys! Way to go, 2013.