Pulitzer central

Oops.

Monday night we were out for a nice neighborhood walk and a stop at the ice cream shop. We walked past Changing Hands, and I started seeing all the signs: retired English professors I used to know, hipster girls with Kindles on gold chains around their necks, scruffy guys muttering about how “nobody in workshop understands the pathetic fallacy.” Yeah, I’d completely forgotten about T.M. McNally’s reading.

So, I accept my seven writerly demerits, and I guarantee you I’ll do better next time. Over the next few weeks, it won’t be hard.

For starters, we’ve got three Pulitzer winners in eight days. Marilynne Robinson is reading tonight at 8pm at UA in Tucson, and will stick around to say something about Wallace Stevens tomorrow afternoon. (James Wood has this take on her new novel, Home.)

Monday night, it’s Junot Díaz, who’s at Changing Hands to read from Oscar Wao. If you like New York, or Tolkein, or the Dominican Republic, or genius writers, you have to go. If you just like a lot of cursing from the podium, you have to go. If you can’t go (I really can’t imagine a good reason), you have to read the novel, which he worked on forever. If you can’t do that, you have to read Drown. The stories in that book can change your life in 20 minutes.

Then a week from Saturday, Jane Smiley will be at the Tempe Center for the Arts. You have to go to hear her, too. No excuses. There’s not even an ASU game that night. And maybe she’ll read one of the 900(?) sex scenes from Ten Days in the Hills.

After that, there’s a little break. But then Len “Let Me Tell You About Pultizers” Downie from the Post is in town for a lecture on October 16. And for the poets in the audience, Charles Simic (yet another Pulitzer winner) will be here November 6, reading at ASU.

Sandwiched in between those two, on Oct. 30 at Changing Hands is none other than… Alan Cheuse. You MUST go to that reading. (Or, at least, I have to go. He taught me absolutely everything I know. (He did the same for Norman Mailer; evidence at right.)) He’ll be reading from his new novel, To Catch the Lightning, which examines the life of nineteenth-century photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. If Alan’s last artist novel, The Light Possessed, is any guide, this new work is going to be spectacular.