Random Notes from the Party Hopping Circuit

By Ron Hogan on May 5, 2008 1:58 PM

Amy Tan was flitting from one end of her SoHo loft to the other and back again Friday night, taking pictures of the guests at her party for fellow authors Rabih Alameddine and Aleksandar Hemon, both of whom were in town for the PEN World Voices festival. Although it was touch and go as to whether Hemon was going to make it—as Alameddine chatted with guests in the living room, a Riverhead publicist related, in excruciating detail, how Hemon and his family had been stuck at the airport in Chicago for an extra eight hours and had only just now landed at LaGuardia. Fortunately, they were able to get downtown just in time for the scheduled end of the party, which showed no signs of stopping…

Earlier in the evening, I’d swung by the Rubin Museum of Art, where Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid were holding a reception for their new cookbook, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China. While I was sampling some of the appetizers that had been prepared from the book, including a fantastic chickpea-carrot fritter, I met up with Jennifer 8. Lee, and we talked to Jamie Harder from Workman about how easy the recipes in the book were supposed to be. Oh, sure, I said, until you get to the chapter where you’re making your own Kazakh noodles from scratch, but no, she assured me, you could totally do it with a food processor. I still think I’ll work my way through some of the stir-fry dishes first.

All last week, when I told people I was going to a book party for American Eve, a book about Evelyn Nesbit, the turn-of-the-century “It Girl” who plays a prominent role at the beginning of Ragtime, and that E.L. Doctorow was throwing the party for the author, they thought that was pretty awesome. So how did Hofstra professor Paula Uruburu (right) connect with Doctorow, I wondered. A few years back, she said, she was going out with a man who was teaching the Doctorows how to sail, and the two couples wound up socializing—but, she says, she deliberately held back from telling him about her project out of modesty. Eventually, he asked point blank what she was working on, and then took an immediate interest, even helping her to find an agent for the book.

After putting together hundreds of bookstore events for other authors in her role as associate director of publicity at William Morrow, Sarah Burningham got a party of her own last week, celebrating the release of How To Raise Your Parents at Books of Wonder last Tuesday night. PW editor Lynn Andriani and I were commenting on how much the cartoony girl on the cover looked like our idea of a teenage Sarah—so, I asked while she was signing copies, did she ever wear her hair like that? She did, she said, and she occasionally thought about cutting it down to that length again sometimes… For now, though, she’s got a two-week book tour to keep her busy—and the finishing touches are being put on her next teen advice manual, Boyology 101.

And I really should have been taking pictures at the Yale Club reception for Steerforth Press authors Benjamin Taylor and Fredrica Wagman later that night, especially when Marion Ettlinger pointed out to me that she’d photographed all four women talking to each other just three feet away. Then again, I didn’t even recognize Philip Roth as the other guy at the table when I came over to say goodbye to one of my friends, so my party hopping skills apparently need some honing.

(Fortunately, after reading this post, the folks at Steerforth took pity on me and sent along this picture from the evening, so I’ll be able to spot Roth, flanked here by Taylor and Wagman, at future parties.)

Taylor -roth-wagman.jpg