Here are some literary events to spice up your week. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post at least one week before the event.

Award-winning writer Ben Ehrenreich will headline an event to celebrate his new novel Ether. See him on Tuesday, November 15th at City Lights Bookstore starting 7 p.m. (San Francisco, CA)

Pubslush will be hosting its first meetup. Join the organization on Wednesday, November 16th at The Thirsty Scholar starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

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What makes a popular book trailer? Bongs, apparently.

The book trailer for Mike Edison‘s memoir, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World, has earned nearly 300,000 views on YouTube.

The trailer shows off The Bong Guitar–encouraging recreational drug use and reading. The video’s controversial subject matter has topped other Macmillan videos by hundreds of thousands of views. In comparison, here are the other videos in the top five:

Typewriter to the Bookstore has 58,212 views
Augusten Burroughs’ You Better Not Cry! has 52,897 views
Tom Friedman on the Environment has 37,565 views
Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day has 32,126 views

Last night GalleyCat stopped by the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, for a night of wine, music, dancing, and books. At the party, the dancers in the photo cut loose to celebrate “Blues, Booze, & BBQ” by Michael Loyd Young–a photographic journey through the Mississippi Delta.

Bluesman T-Model Ford (pictured) played a long, gorgeous set in the middle of the bookstore, grinning like he won the lottery while Brooklynites danced.

While everybody else danced, this GalleyCat editor chatted with Mike Edison about his holiday-themed book trailer and grilled new author Eric Davidson about his upcoming book, “We Never Learn.”

Here’s more about Young’s book: “Blues, Booze, & BBQ, the first book by Michael Loyd Young, documents 150 miles of Highway 61, the famed blacktop road snaking from Memphis, Tennessee down to Greenville, Mississippi. At the halfway point, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, sits Clarksdale, Mississippi, the city considered the birthplace of the blues and the location of Robert Johnson‘s famed ‘Cross Road Blues’ intersection of Highway 61 and 49.”

GalleyCat caught up with Mike Edison‘s I Have Fun in Brooklyn Five-Star Super Tour last night, a raucous mix of storytelling, book promotion, and rock & roll crammed into a skinny Fort Greene bar.

The tour already hit the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Williamsburg, as musicians helped Edison pitch the paperback version of his memoir, “I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.” He’ll make two more Brooklyn stops–a burger flipping music event at Red Hook’s Freebird Books and a final party at Roberta’s Restaurant in Bushwick.

After the show, GalleyCat caught up with Edison to find out why New York book tours should spend more time in Brooklyn. He explained: “Everywhere I hit on this tour, no one is jaded, no one is suffering from the typical seen-it-all ennui that so many literary types seem to suffer from. Everyone is genuinely appreciative that we are coming out, and and working hard for them, doing something different. No kidding, this is the future of book touring. Forget fancy ‘name’ bookstores, you gotta go where the people are–where they sell drinks.”

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Last night memoirist, editor, and rock & roll scribe Mike Edison launched the paperback edition of “I Have Fun Everywhere I Go” with a blazing set by Boss Hog. So blazing, in fact, that one GalleyCat editor’s videocamera couldn’t handle the punk rock book party at the Manhattan club, Bowery Electric.

The camera worked, however. Here, Edison is pictured between cartoonist John Holmstrom and Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye. They were two of the many musical and literary stars at the event enjoying free beer and White Castle sliders.

GalleyCat caught up with Rachel Shukert, who is finishing her follow-up to “Have You No Shame?” Oddly enough, her new memoir combines the influences of Elizabeth Gilbert and George Orwell. We also chatted with Denise Oswald about her plans as the newly minted editorial director of Soft Skull Press.

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go
Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World
by Mike Edison
(Faber & Faber)
Reviewed By Andrew Foster Altschul

Memoirs can be split into two rough camps: those that place their narrator front and center, and those focused on external events. The former narcissistically inflates its protagonist, even when describing misbehavior or abjection – it says my experience is exemplary, my challenges or tragedies can illuminate your life. It’s an arrogant form, badly abused and overmarketed of late.

The latter approach is more dignified, asserting only that the storyteller was in a unique position to recount and interpret events others might find interesting, shocking, perhaps edifying. Mike Edison’s I Have Fun Everywhere I Go falls comfortably into this camp, a rogue’s journey that mesmerizes and charms readers with its exuberant rampage through the worlds of punk rock, pro wrestling, and hardcore pornography.

Edison is a film-school dropout, drummer for the punk outfit Sharky’s Machine, itinerant editor, and self-proclaimed “media whore.” His two-decade quest for “Top Secret Action” takes him around the world, from dingy, violent punk clubs to the offices of Cheri and Screw, and finally, improbably, to the publisher’s chair at High Times, this last a period of excruciating frustration and the book’s most dramatically compelling sequence. Along the way, readers gape at this “hedonistic lifestyle of wanton rock ‘n’ roll, stupidity, sex, and drugs,” and the inane behavior of everyone Edison encounters, all chronicled with good-natured ebullience tinged with occasional criticism – though never lingering on this long enough to kill anyone’s buzz.

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