Tuesday October 25th: KGB Non-Fiction Reading Series with Lisa Carver and Kristin Kaye

Also, Grace Reading Series now has a blog,, and has an interview up with the wonderful Jill Soloway. Meanwhile, you will not get to read my drunken banter in next week's issue of New York magazine. Maybe you never will, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and keep trying to get an answer. Update: Look for that article in the November 14th issue of New York,, though clearly I will also be blogging about it. If I like how it came out, it'll be a little post-birthday merriment; if I don't, well, welcome to my 30s. But I'm excited.

Please join us for a night of non-fiction for and about tough broads. Lisa Carver reads from her new memoir, DRUGS ARE NICE, and Kristin Kaye reads from her book about female body builders, IRON MAIDENS.

Doors open at 7PM; readings begin at 7:15.

KGB Tuesday Night Non-Fiction: 85 E. 4th Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues.
Subway F/V to Second Ave, 6 to Bleecker. FREE! -- www.kgbbar.com

Lisa Carver: DRUGS ARE NICE -- A Post-punk Memoir

In this eye-opening memoir, Lisa Crystal Carver recalls her extraordinary youth and charts the late-80s, early-90s punk subculture that she helped shape. She recounts how her band Suckdog was born in 1987 and the wild events that followed: leaving small-town New Hampshire to tour Europe at 18, becoming a teen publisher of fanzines, a teen bride, and a teen
prostitute.

Spin has called Suckdog's album Drugs Are Nice one of the best of the '90s, and the book includes photos of infamous European shows. Yet the book also tells of how Lisa saw the need for change in 1994, when her baby was born with a chromosomal deletion and his father became violent. With lasting lightness and surprising gravity, Drugs Are Nice is a definitive account of the generation that wanted to break every rule, but also a story of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms.

Kristin Kaye: IRON MAIDENS -- The Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World

At age twenty-three and fresh out of drama school, Kristin Kaye landed her dream job: to write and direct a Broadway show in New York City. Its title, The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World, starring twenty-five of the world¹s most muscular women. Her mandate? To turn The Celebration into a High Art Happening exalting women's
physical and intellectual strength.

Kaye thought this was her chance to enter a whole new feminist arena, but in reality she was about to enter another world entirely: her carefully orchestrated artistic interludes would be sandwiched between skits involving white lace thongs, smoke machines, and a bodybuilder spinning by her neck.

Kaye tells the whole story in this hilarious book, alternating between an account of directing the show, which builds to the disastrous climax of opening night, and reportage on women¹s bodybuilding and the little-known sub-culture around it, including the use of steroids, the side business of strong women who wrestle men for money, and the judging controversy that threatens to split the sport in two.