A morality tale, set in DUMBO

By Chuck O’Donnell

DUMBO is now the stuff of legend.

In the new short comic book story, “DUMBO, A Pagan Walks Among Us,” the neighborhood gets its own fable, thanks to musician JG Thirlwell’s careful cadence and artist Jen Ferguson’s protean pallet of pencils, watercolors, inks, pastels and acrylics.

The two DUMBO neighbors collaborated on the piece for “Cousin Corinne’s Reminder #3,” an anthology published by BookCourt that champions Brooklyn’s authors, photographers, artists and cartoonists, including novelist Emma Straub and comic book artist Josh Neufeld.

“I was asked to write something about Brooklyn and I thought it would work to write about something that illustrates the changing face of Brooklyn,” said Thirlwell.

His story begins with couples sipping coffee as they stroll down the street, passing mothers out for leisurely walks with their kids in today’s “dainty DUMBO” — a safe haven for poets and indie filmmakers. Then the story flashes back to the balmy Saturday afternoon when Thirlwell was slashed on the hand by a mugger on York Street when he first moved here in the 1980s.

The police soon apprehend a man they’re pretty sure cut Thrilwell. But Thirlwell is presented with a moral dilemma when he isn’t sure he can identify the man. Does he go along with the cops, who strongly suggest which man in the lineup he should pick? Or does he listen to his nagging conscience that whispers he might be sending the wrong man to jail?

Ferguson saw Thirlwell’s story of as an urban fable, so she gave the comic book a little bit of an “Alice in Wonderland” whimsy by depicting the characters as rabbits.

“Employing the rabbit characters fits squarely in the tradition of the fable, where anthropomorphized creatures tell a moral or folk tale,” said Ferguson.

“Besides,” she said, “I just like to draw rabbits.”

“Cousin Corinne’s Reminder # 3” release party at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], July 14 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit bookcourt.org.

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The 'Maine' event

By Meredith Deliso

At nearly 400 hardcover pages, “Maine” is the least convenient beach read. But it’ll be worth toting around this summer.

In fact, J. Courtney Sullivan’s follow-up to her best-selling debut, “Commencement,” is shaping up to be a major beach read this summer, thanks in part to its setting — a summer at a Cape Neddick vacation home — but also its engaging, fully realized characters.

The ambitious novel (there’s a reason it’s 400 pages) follows three generations of Kelleher women — the fear-instilling but beautiful mother, Alice; her daughter, Kathleen, the black sheep of the family who’s moved across the country to work on a worm farm; her seemingly perfect, doll house-obsessed stepdaughter, Ann Marie; and her granddaughter, Maggie, a writer living in Brooklyn Heights who is pregnant, and freshly broken up with her boyfriend.

The cross-generation set-up allowed the Park Slope writer to explore a theme integral to her work.

“I am fascinated by the idea of how women develop personally in the context of the world that they are raised in, and live in as adults,” said Sullivan. “Everything I’ve written so far, I’ve looked at that.”

“Maine” has also provided the author to explore such heavy hitters as alcoholism, sibling rivalry and Catholic guilt, in a novel that can be achingly sad and refreshingly funny.

Sullivan is already at work on a new book — this one tackling the institution of marriage — and can be found almost daily at the Brooklyn Writers Space.

“It’s one of the most fabulous things about Brooklyn, it has totally saved me,” said Sullivan. “When I started writing full time, I always had this dream of working from home, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and writing all day. But there are so many distractions when at home. At the Writers Space, you wouldn’t hear a peep.”

“Maine” is still very much on her mind, though, and Sullivan will be at Cobble Hill’s BookCourt tomorrow for a reading, which won’t be short on bringing some Maine flavor to Brooklyn — there will be lobster rolls.

J. Courtney Sullivan at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], June 14 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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The 'Summer' of Siri

 By Meredith Deliso

Siri Hustvedt could really use some science fiction in her life.

The writer, teacher, poet, and lecturer is the busiest she’s ever been, one week flying off to speak at the Sorbonne on the psychobiology of trauma, the next  participating in a book club with Jennifer Egan and Margot Livesey, and the one after that giving a reading.

“I’m so busy, that’s my only problem,” said Hustvedt, who reads at Cobble Hill's BookCourt tonight. “I wish I had three selves at the moment.”

In that scenario, one self, at least, would be writing. The longtime Park Sloper (and wife of fellow novelist Paul Auster) recently released her fifth novel, the heady, yet zippy, “The Summer Without Men.”

The summer in question belongs to Mia Fredricksen, a poet who, after her husband leaves her for a younger woman, suffers a breakdown and flees Brooklyn to her Minnesota hometown to recover among a land of women that includes a group of sage widows and, on the opposite spectrum, catty teenage girls whom she winds up teaching.

Despite its serious start, the novel finds the writer stretching her funny bone thanks to Mia’s caustic, ironic voice — much a departure from Hustvedt’s “rational, calmer” one — which calls her husband’s adulterer “the Pause,” as Hustvedt dives into the deep well of inspiration that is love, marriage, and gender differences.

“I’ve never written a character with that kind of voice,” said Hustvedt. “I’ve heard reports of people on planes laughing out loud while reading it. That makes me very happy.”

Hustvedt is already deep into her next work of fiction — the provocatively named “Monsters at Home” — though no doubt will be pulled towards essays and lectures on neurobiology, trauma, psychoanalyst — whatever suits her fancy. When not hitting the keys, she can be found browsing the aisles at her local Blue Apron Foods, or in her backyard garden, tending to her rhododendrons, roses and azaleas.

“When I’m gardening, the thing that I call my internal narrator, the voice in my head that’s generating inner speech, seems to turn off entirely,” said Hustedt. “It’s a relief, because I’m constantly manufacturing sentences in my head.”

Suffice it to say, she must not do a lot of gardening.

Siri Hustvedt reads at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], tonight at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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Funny girl

By Meredith Deliso

Sloane Crosley loves reading to people — and it doesn’t even have to be her own work.

“I’ve been known to get so excited about a short story and read it to my friends over the phone,” said Crosley. “I can’t believe I did this, this is so cruel, but I once read, ‘White Angel’ in its entirety to someone. And it was midnight.”

Of course, Crosley has plenty of her own material to pick from, including her latest humor collection, “How Did You Get This Number,” which will bring Crosley to BookCourt this Thursday.

The collection follows her sometimes awkward, always introspective adventures in New York and aboard — the travails of a kleptomaniac roommate; visiting a former brothel haunted by the ghosts of its former tenants (if only in her over-active imagination); taking a solo vacation to Lisbon, a place she chose by spinning a globe and landing a finger blindly picking a spot; and a run-in with a grizzly while visiting Alaska.

They’re witty, spot-on reads about the peculiarities of New York life — just like her prior best-selling collection, “I Thought There’d Be Cake.” Though as the author prepares to revisit of the work on the event of its paperback release, it’s not without some reservations about those readings she so dearly loves.

“I don’t want to be that person who’s at the party not taking the social cues that they just told this story,” said Crosley. “But you have to have a little bit of faith in yourself. And remember that they’re laughing with you, not at you.”

Sloane Crosley at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], May 12 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org. Also at powerHouse Arena [37 Main St. at Water Street in DUMBO, (718) 666-3049], May 24 at 8 pm. Free. For info, visit www.powerhousearena.org.

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A visit from Jennifer Egan

By Meredith Deliso

The last thing Jennifer Egan wants is for you to get tired of her.

But since her book “A Visit from the Goon Squad” came out last June, the Fort Greene writer fears that she has been on a constant book tour to support the praised piece of fiction.

“It did not sell very well [at first], though it got really good reviews, so I felt like it really had to continue to support it,” said Egan. “In another situation, I might have just said, ‘Enough, I’m going to let it sink or swim on its own.’ I felt I couldn’t do that with his one.”

That effort — her “endless babbling,” as she calls it — seems to have paid off: the book is in its 11th printing, made numerous year end top-10 lists and, just this month, it won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, beating out the much-hyped “Freedom” by a non-Brooklynite named Franzen.

The Circle praised the experimental form of Egan’s third novel — her most ambitious, inventive piece to date — as it follows intersecting characters in the music industry, including an aging record exec, Lou; his protégé, Bennie; his troubled assistant, Sasha; and her children, whose chapters are told in surprisingly moving PowerPoint slides. It’s a tale that spans decades, jumping around from present day New York to 1970s San Francisco to a dystopian future — and is one as much about time (that cruel goon in question) as it is the music industry.

“The book is about time, and time and music are so interwoven. We walk around awash in our own past, listening to songs that meant a lot to us at certain points,” said Egan. “As a journalist, I had always wanted to learn more about the music industry, but I never did. It was just a yen to write about this world that was unfulfilled in the nonfiction realm.”

Now that she’s gotten that out of her system, Egan is looking to get back into her next big project — a novel about the women who worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. But not before she does a bit more babbling, including two readings in Brooklyn in one week — at BookCourt tonight and the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday.

“I’m keenly aware you can’t do this forever, or you will become deeply boring,” said Egan. “I’m happy to do it a bit longer, then I think I’m going to have to close my mouth for several years and go back to what I do — which is write.”

Jennifer Egan at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], March 28 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org; also at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [651 Fulton St. near between Rockwell and Ashland places in Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100], March 31 at 6:30 pm as part of its “Eat, Drink and Be Literary” series. Tickets $50 (includes dinner, wine, tax and tip). For info, visit www.bam.org.

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Brit lit at BookCourt

By Meredith Deliso

It’s a British invasion at BookCourt!

Two notable cross-pond scribes will hit the Cobble Hill bookstore on Thursday for a fun night of satire and music — with a little reading thrown in.

Author Jonathan Coe’s book, “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim,” is a England-set satire about the disconnectedness of modern life.

Then Wesley Stace — the former Englishman who music lovers know by his nom de guitar, John Wesley Harding — will celebrate his new book, “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer,” a murder mystery about a 19th-century composer who kills his wife and her lover the night before his opera premieres.

The British folk tradition figures prominently in the historical drama, so Stace might break out his guitar.

“I don’t think as an author you should feel yourself required to do a tap dance just because you can, but there is one song, ‘Little Musgrave,’ that is very pertinent to my book and would eloquently set up the scene,” said Stace.

Cheers, mate.

Wesley Stace and Jonathan Coe at Book Court [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], March 10 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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Just call him Mr. Funny Pants

By Meredith Deliso

Michael Showalter is a tad obsessed with process.

In “Mr. Funny Pants,” the comedian’s new quasi-memoir, he spends five chapters discussing writing the book, including a preface, post-preface, and post-post preface, and even fake reviews for the finished product.

It’s a tactic that may fail in less skilled hands, but makes for a brainy, offbeat and, yes, funny, literary debut filled with irreverent, clever pieces — an imaginary interview with Charlie Rose, a parody of an ad for an online university — as well as tidbits from his own life. (See him discuss the book on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" below.)

Showalter may be new to the publishing world, but he’s made a name for himself in sketch comedy, thanks to The State, Stella, and his Comedy Central show with Michael Ian Black, “Michael and Michael Have Issues.” He’s also a dependable regular at almost every major Brooklyn comedy event.

To celebrate his new book, he’ll first perform at Eugene Mirman’s “Pretty Good Friends” show, and then read at BookCourt in Cobble Hill on March 1. So you’ll have two chances to find out why he’s earned the title, Mr. Funny Pants.

Michael Showalter at the Bell House [149 Seventh St. between Second and Third avenues in Gowanus, (718) 643-6510], Feb. 27, 8 pm, $10; BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], March 1, 7 pm, free. For info, visit www.michaelshowalter.net.

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'Swamp' thing

By Meredith Deliso

Karen Russell has never quite left Florida.

In her highly imaginative debut, “Swamplandia!” the Miami native-turned-New York transplant tells the story of a family of alligator wrestlers and their struggling Everglades tourist attraction, Swamplandia.

“I tried to write an urban story once, but it still had a scarecrow,” said Russell, who’ll read at BookCourt on Feb. 2. “Maybe I need a bit of time lag, like jet lag.”

For now, Russell, who joined the literati ranks of Jonathem Lethem and Nicole Krauss with an inclusion on the New Yorker magazine’s “20 Under 40” list, is wonderfully stuck in the Everglades as she follows Ava Bigtree, a 13-year-old who ventures deep into the unknown swamp to find her sister, an otherworldly type who’s fallen in love with the ghost of a young man. It’s an enchanting piece of escapism that’s as much about the young girl’s adventures as it is this strange, foreign land.

“It’s a really eerie, alien place. It’s always amazing to me,” said Russell. “It really feels like anything can be possible.”

Karen Russell at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], Feb. 2 at 7 pm. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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'Married' to it

By Meredith Deliso

To say Emma Straub is busy is an understatement.

A typical day may find the writer making posters through M + E, the printing business she runs with her husband out of their Prospect Lefferts Gardens studio, volunteering at the non-profit Girls Write Now, and, of course, writing.

Over the past five years or so, she’s managed to eke out a collection of witty, sharply observed short stories, whose recurring themes of love, loss and alienation belie the author’s sunny disposition. That compilation, “Other People We Married,” which includes her acclaimed novella, “Fly-Over State,” comes out next month, and she celebrates with a reading at BookCourt this Thursday.

Oh, did we mention she works there, too?      

“Whenever I get to do anything at BookCourt, it’s like extra fun,” said Straub, who usually stands out at the Cobble Hill bookstore thanks to her vintage hair accessories. “It’s like a giant dollop of whipped cream. I love that I get to work there. It’s almost too wonderful.”

And there’s that sunny disposition.

Emma Straub reads from “Other People We Married” at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], Jan. 27 at 7 pm. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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This 'zine's the thing

By Meredith Deliso

Apps be damned!

For a handy old-school pocket companion, check out the “Zinester’s Guide to NYC,” an illustrated guidebook that will give you the best in Japanese breakfasts, bars, pizza, craft supplies, used books, punk rope, storefront museums, subway musicians and more.

More than 50 New York-based ’zine and indie comics publishers contributed listings and illustrations, with Brooklyn shoutouts including the City Reliquary, the Brooklyn Brewery, Sahadi’s, and, of course, the Mermaid Parade.

“The best way to experience the city is to really participate in it,” said author Ayun Halliday. “Why watch the parade when you can march in it? People should know that they can guest bartend, create a public park in a parking space on National Park(ing) Day, and submit the five-minute movies they shoot on the Boardwalk to next year’s Coney Island Film Festival.”

To celebrate the release, Halliday is throwing a “Non-Denominational Brooklyn Cookie Swap” at Book Court in Cobble Hill on Dec. 15, where you can take in festive tales of Brooklyn, and lesser boroughs, from contributors including Melissa Bastian, Leslie Henkel, Kelly McClure, Joshua Medsker, Bill Roundy, Josh Saitz, and, of course, Halliday herself.

And if you don’t feel like baking, you can always look up in the guide book where to score some sweets.

Non-Denominational Brooklyn Cookie Swap at Book Court [163 Court St. between Dean and Pacific streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], Dec. 15 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit ayunhalliday.com.

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Paul Auster heads south to 'Sunset Park'

By Meredith Deliso

Brooklyn has its hold on Paul Auster.

The New York-centric writer has a habit for setting his stories in the borough, including his 1995 movie, “Smoke,” set in a Park Slope candy store, and his earlier novel, “Brooklyn Follies,” also set in Park Slope, among a cast of familiar characters (BPMs, anyone?).

In his newest novel, Auster moves a bit farther south. “Sunset Park” follows a group of young squatters — a musician, artist, grad student and somewhat lost but enigmatic individual, Miles Heller — who hole up in an abandoned building during the early onset of the recession. 

This wouldn’t be an Auster novel without contemplations of failure, chance, loneliness, coincidence (in this case, all the characters’ familiarity with the early Hollywood film, “The Best Years of Our Lives”), and, naturally, place.

“I was thinking about the idea of dispossession. I had an image in my head of someone being thrown out of the place where he lives, just kicked out on the street,” said Auster. “As I was thinking about the story, I picked up my head and looked around, and low and behold, all across America, people are being booted out of their house because of mortgage foreclosure.”

Auster only had to pick up his head again and look around to find further inspiration, this time for the house his characters made their impermanent home.

“I took a lot of walks around Sunset Park, and one day, I came across this odd little wooden structure, facing Green-Wood Cemetery, on a very deserted block. I thought, this is just the kind of place people could try to get into and squat in,” said Auster. “And it would be the kind of neighborhood where I think something like this would be possible. It’s a rather spread out, downtrodden part of Brooklyn. That house for me was the center of the book, and I just love the words — ‘Sunset Park’ — they’re very evocative to me.”

Auster took a few pictures of the building for reference while he wrote his book — which was a good thing, as it has since been torn down — and describes it thusly: “a dopey little two-story wooden house with a roofed-over front porch, looking for all the world like something that had been stolen from a farm on the Minnesota prairie and plunked down by accident in the middle of New York.” 

For the past 25 years, Auster has lived not far from Sunset Park, in Park Slope (“That would not be a place to squat,” he says. “You couldn’t get away with it there”). He’s called Brooklyn home for even longer, moving around from Carroll Gardens to Cobble Hill, not far from where he’ll read tomorrow, at BookCourt.

“Henry [Zook] had just started BookCourt when I lived in Cobble Hill,” said Auster. “It’s wonderful to see how it’s expanded over the years, and how he’s turned it into one of the best bookstores in the city.”

Similarly, over the years, Auster has become recognized as one of the foremost writers in the city, thanks to the strength of “The New York Trilogy” and the absurdist “Moon Palace.”

“Sunset Park,” though it uses a more straightforward form than his more classic works that play with form, is sure to please the Auster fan, thanks to compelling, fully realized characters that you wind up caring about — well, enough to spend 300 pages with. And, for those who also like the writer’s keen observations of Brooklyn, it probably won’t be his last borough-centric piece, either.

“I’ve been living here for so long, it’s my place now. I know it better than anywhere else,” said Auster. “I don’t have any plans to move anywhere else. My wife and I say, we’ll stay in our house until the day we can no longer get up and down the stairs.”

Paul Auster at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], Nov. 18 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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Remember this - Myla Goldberg is the 'It' girl of literature

By Meredith Deliso and Adam Warner

When she was 10 years old, Myla Goldberg threw a pair of scissors at her friend. It wasn’t her best moment.

A few years ago, more than two decades later, the author found herself remembering that incident, and still felt pretty bad about it, so during Yom Kippur, she looked up the friend to atone for her sin. 

Turns out, the friend didn’t remember it happening at all, but accepted the apology anyway.

“It was this great amnestic moment,” said Goldberg. “We all subconsciously edit our lives, and you never know what random thing might bring something back.”

It’s moments like that that helped inspire the latest novel from Goldberg, who catapulted to literary fame 10 years ago with her debut, “Bee Season.”

“The False Friend,” out this month on Doubleday, focuses on a successful woman living in Chicago who, after 20 years, returns to her hometown to confess the role she played in the disappearance of a childhood friend, an assumed victim of abduction. All her life, she’s lied about what really happened, blocking the traumatic memory, only to face the consequences of confronting her family, friends, and a past she had come to forget.

The result is a book that explores aging, the unreliability of memory, and the truths we accept or reject. It’s thematically linked to the childhood trauma and remorse of Stephen King’s “It” — without the blood, gore or clowns.

“We all used to be someone else in one way or another,” said Goldberg. “It’s a weird sort of feeling to go back to where you’re from and face who you were.” 

This isn’t the first time Goldberg has put her memory in a time machine.

“Both in this novel and my previous, ‘Wickett’s Remedy,’ there is an interest in the fallibility of memory,” said Goldberg, whose previous novel was set during the influenza pandemic of 1918. (Don’t remember that bit of history? Exactly.) 

Both novels are dramatic departures from her debut book, “Bee Season,” a seemingly simple story about a girl, a spelling bee and its catastrophic effects on her family that put Goldberg on the literary map (having Hollywood turn it into a movie wasn’t bad, either). 

“I basically won the literary lottery,” said Goldberg. “The lifestyle I have now — I can be a full-time writer — is due entirely to the fact that my first book did extremely well. It’s extremely gratifying.”

The hard part was how to follow that up, though the author feels at peace with people’s expectations as she celebrates her third novel. In fact, she’s pretty distanced from the borough’s literary scene, save for her infrequent, low-stakes poker games with the likes of Colson Whitehead, Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem, “before he flew the coop.” 

“There’s a very vibrant arts scene in Brooklyn, but I don’t feel like I have any scene,” said Goldberg, who’s perfectly content playing board games at her Kensington home, seeing film retrospectives at BAM and playing the occasional gig with her art-punk band, the Walking Hellos. 

After spending the last five years working on her new novel, she’s also content to take a little breather from writing. Whether or not her next novel continues to explore the facets of memory — that remains to be seen.

“Certain issues stick with authors whether or not they want them to,” said Goldberg. “Memory might be mine.”

Myla Goldberg reads from “The False Friend” at Book Court [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677], Oct. 7 at 7 pm. Free. For info, visit www.bookcourt.org.

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'Gilbert' author Peter Hedges talks life in 'The Heights'

By Stephen Witt

He’s the writer from Iowa who didn’t go to the famed Iowa’s Writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa.

But Iowa’s loss is Brooklyn’s gain, and author Peter Hedges’ latest tome, “The Heights” (Dutton), offers up an often funny and captivating story that looks at contemporary life in Brooklyn Heights.

Hedges, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” got the idea for the novel in late 1997 while sitting with his young family on a park bench in Pierrepont Playground as he began imagining what could happen in the neighborhood.

“I thought it was a great place for this story to occur. I took notes for many weeks and locked onto the idea of writing about a good marriage, and wanted to have that marriage go through an unthinkable test,” said Hedges.

The novel, which took 12 years to write, was interrupted several times by screenwriting assignments on the films “About a Boy” and “Dan in Real Life,” but slowly began to take shape.

The story involves the middle-class couple, Tim, who teaches at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights, and his wife, Kate, who get involved with the wealthy Anna. Then, their lives become unhinged by a secret invitation from an unlikely messenger.

“I was interested in an ordinary couple being swept up by an extraordinary encounter with people who are not so ordinary,” said Hedges. “So if you’re a person that lives really on the ground and the earth, what happens when you get swept up and are in danger of flying or floating or sailing off into space?”

While there appears to be some similarities between real places in Brooklyn Heights and Hedges’ own life, the author insists the novel is a total work of fiction.

“I took great care in creating Montague Academy and Oak Lane where the main characters exist by setting up a fictional school and fictional street,” he said.

Hedges said his wife is from Brooklyn and the couple decided to move to the borough after their children were born.

“I tend to be a nine to five type of guy,” he said of his writing habits. “It doesn’t feel like work, but I try to treat it like a job.”

This includes walking the 15 minutes from his home in Boerum Hill each day to his studio office in Brooklyn Heights.

Although originally from Iowa, Hedges attended college at the North Carolina School for the Arts, and then came to New York, where he wrote several plays before getting his big break with “Gilbert Grape,” which starred Johnny Depp and Leonardo Di Caprio.

He still sees the two actors from time to time, most recently running into Depp at the recent Tim Burton exhibition at MOMA.

Hedges said Brooklyn Heights as the setting for the novel is also a tribute to a great neighborhood where such writers as Thomas Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller lived and wrote.

He also is proud to count himself as one of the growing number of writers to now call the borough his home.

“Brooklyn is the place to be and live from an artistic standpoint and this is Brooklyn’s moment. It’s a very vibrant scene,” he said.

Hedges will be reading from The Heights at Book Court, 163 Court Street on Thursday March 4 at 7 p.m.

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Cousin Corinne launches

Exciting news from Cobble Hill's Book Court:

COUSIN CORINNE and BOOKCOURT proudly announce the launch of COUSIN CORINNE'S REMINDER, a biannual publication that features new writing, photography, and comix from artists around the world.

BOOKCOURT'S General Manager and Events Coordinator, Zack Zook, is COUSIN CORINNE'S founding owner and executive editor. He has teamed with a variety of highly talented NYC editors and curators to craft this remarkable series.

COUSIN CORINNE'S REMINDER - Issue Number One will be appearing in bookstores and galleries in the United States and Europe beginning March, 2010. Personal Subscriptions to the REMINDER series are currently available through both the COUSIN CORINNE and BOOKCOURT websites. The premiere issue features the following contributors:

Writing: Charles Bock, Mark Borthwick, Todd Colby, James Frey, Ben Lasman, Donald Moss, Shira Nayman, Alice Notley, John Burnham Schwartz, Emma Straub, Anne Waldman, John Wray, and Hannah Zeavin.

Comix: Mike Cavallaro, Jen Ferguson, Jonathan Lethem & Dean Haspiel, Tim Hall & Jennifer Hayden, Michel Fiffe, and Kat Roberts.

Photography: Mark Borthwick, Mona Kuhn, Noah McLaurine, and Kimiko Yoshida.

Interviews: Sarah Manguso and Mona Kuhn

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