Jennifer Finney Boylan was kind enough to fill me in on the goings-on at last week's annual convention for the New England Independent Booksellers Association, held in Providence, Rhode Island, including the awards presented to Richard Russo (President's Award), Gregory McGuire (fiction), and Roy Blount, Jr. (nonfiction). "Blount was praised for his 'wonderful body of work,'" Boylan reports, "and then as he took the podium, noted that it was 'the first time anybody every told me I had a wonderful body.'"

Then there was the Friday night cocktail party where about a dozen authors were "handing out free books and bound galleys like they were chili cheese dogs" (including Boylan herself, who has a new memoir, I'm Looking Through You, coming out next January). "The guy to kill, of course, was the wonderful Brock Clarke," she adds, "whose book An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England seemed to generate the most buzz on the floor. To make it worse, Brock is, apparently, a smart, wise, generous guy, making the other writers conclude the obvious: he must be stopped... The hilarity continued into the night at a Providence bar called the Trinity Brew Pub, where the truly brave could be treated to the sight of publishers, booksellers and writers dancing together without shame."

Boylan also passed along the best come-on line of the evening: "A guy who sells custom miniature harmonicas for sale at bookstore cash registers got my attention by blowing his harp, making eye contact, and saying, 'Hey sweetie. Ya ever seen a harmonica this little?' I hadn't."