David Lida will make a presentation based on his book First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 1 at the STOP SMILING Storefront.

Lida was born in New York City but decided to leave when he saw much of what he loved about his hometown — energy, spontaneity, cultural richness — dwindling and homogenizing in the face of development. He found all those things and more in Mexico City, where he’s lived and worked as a writer for the past 15 years. His book, newly in paperback, not only documents his personal experiences there, but also argues that Mexico City is a model city of the 21st century — sprawling, unplanned, vibrant — and our continent’s closest example of what the urban future will look like.

The event at Stop Smiling will be book-ended by lectures by Lida at Loyola University and the University of Chicago. The Stop Smiling event will be a more informal, intimate affair, which will give audience members and the author an opportunity for deeper discourse and exchange. Mexico City native Gabriel Feijoo will moderate the discussion. A reception will follow.

Click here to watch a video trailer for the book.

David Lida presents:
First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century
Thursday, Oct. 1, 7 p.m.
The STOP SMILING Storefront
1371 N Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622

David Lida is a journalist has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Interview, Gourmet and The Village Voice, among others; in Mexico, he wrote and edited (in Spanish) for D.F., which was Mexico City’s equivalent to the New Yorker. He is also the author of an acclaimed book of short stories that take place in Mexico, Travel Advisory, as well as Las llaves de la ciudad, a collection of journalism he wrote in Spanish. For more about David Lida, visit his website at www.davidlida.com.

Who: Gina Frangello, Greg Boose, Amy Guth, Claire Bidwell Smith, Irene Zion, & Raise High the Roof Beam (“the Arcade Fire meets the Muppets”)
What: The Nervous Breakdown
Where: The Whistler (2421 N Milwaukee)
When: Tuesday, September 22 at 7pm – free!

We are not exactly sure what the Nervous Breakdown (NB) is, however we have had them and are particularly excited about this one.  Also we really admired the place on the NB blog where Aleksander Malik described some of his: adolescent misery, cherry season in Menerbes, a soft core porn audition, bigotry, heartbreak and goatees, Oktoberfest, problems of language, homelessness, depression, arguing neighbors, sympathy with homicidal maniacs, returning a robe, my father, my mother, the night sky in Kenya, kissing, my grandparents, abortion, Hemingway, time and semen. Oh! Also we know it’s a spin-off of the Nervous Breakdown “online literary collective,” has sibling reading series in NY and LA, and will be hosted by the lovely Gina Frangello, whose book of short stories, Slut Lullabies, streets in 2010. (Bonus! We are totally Facebook friends with Gina, and her status update says there’ll be goody bags, too.) So basically this is like a totally important moment where Chicago gets to increase the radness of something that’s already quite rad, while drinking classy cocktails. See you there.

The very same company that used Woody Allen’s image without his permission in order to create revenue-generating controversy has denied a young writer permission to use similar tactics to promote his book.

During Q&A at the reading I hosted with Tao Lin last night (Boston Phoenix podcast pending), he revealed that American Apparel declined his publisher’s offer to carry copies of his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel. No matter what you might think of Tao Lin the person, Tao Lin the Internet persona or Tao Lin the writer, American Apparel’s decision is terribly strange.

Although there’s a slim chance that American Apparel’s virtual bookshelf has too many VICE anthologies to fit anything else in, I’ll go out on a limb and conclude that the company’s decision reveals the limits of edgy marketing. This is a clothing line that has made sex-y/-ist images a vital part of its brand. It hasn’t shown the slightest hesitation in offending any number of women by regularly portraying them as smacked-out hipster sex kittens dying to get fucked (by Terry Richardson’s camera no less, eew!).

But, when a book comes along that uses the American Apparel brand name alongside the word “shoplifting” (and incorporates the American Apparel logo’s bare-bones aesthetic into its cover art), party’s over. No matter that the character who enacts the titular shoplifting goes to jail (or, you know, that the book itself isn’t actually about shoplifting, but generational entropy), the mere hint of an association with something that would detract from the store’s profits outweighs the potential benefit of being a store so culturally relevant that it’s now featured in the title of a book from a respectable publisher.

One of the rallying cries of my generation’s cultural critics is that marketing stops at nothing. This is especially true when it comes to brands marketed to young people trying to be alternative.  Dead Kurt Cobain wearing Doc Martens in Heaven? Whatever. An ass, some hair and a pair of legs spread-eagle on a bathroom wall? Who cares. A book that makes reference to something that has the potential to eat away at profits (but only at the hands of  the very, very stupid)? No way!

Now let’s all do coke and masturbate on reporters!

Curtis White, author of the much-lauded The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, will discuss his newest book tonight at 7 p.m. at the Stop Smiling Storefront (1371 N Milwaukee Ave., Chicago).

In his new book, The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money and the Crisis of Nature, White addresses the plight of the natural world, and argues that the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the environmental crisis will not help resolve it. With trademark wit, he contends that the solution might come from such unexpected sectors as the arts, religion and the realm of the moral imagination.

White will read from the book and take questions from the audience. STOP SMILING Editor JC Gabel will moderate. Copies of The Barbaric Heart will be on sale at a discounted price of $10.

The Barbaric Heart Book Launch
Thursday, Sept. 17, 7 p.m.
The STOP SMILING Storefront
1371 N Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622

Email rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com to attend.

As someone who, maybe like you, cut her teeth on letters and zines and freelancing, I can be embarrassingly snooty towards e-lit, embarrassingly precious about/drooly over french flaps and staple wounds and library cards. (Plus, um, “anytime, anywhere,” my eye! Where does Kindle leave folks on the flipside of the digital divide? Especially if they live in Philly?)

But then I read Michael Miner’s Reader profile of CellStories, Dan Sinker’s new project. Sinker’s idea is simple: every morning, people who have iPhones or iTouches or Google Android phones or whatever else can wander on over to CellStories.net, gratis, and read a short story. (What kind? “Some are true,” says the site, “some are not, and many fall in that wonderful grey area between.”) Sinker partners with a variety of reading series, publishers, and straight-up rad writers, many of whom are longtime collaborators from his days at Punk Planet.

What defrosted my cynical heart: “[A cell phone is] tactile in a way a laptop isn’t,” Sinker told Miner. “A laptop is something you’re sitting away from. A mobile phone you cradle. There’s something wonderful about that.” I read that on the train, and embarrassingly-immediately started brainstorming things I could sip or munch while “cradling” my phone and reading “wonderful” stories: toast! whiskey! fudge! E-lit isn’t a coldhearted wasteland! Who knew?

CellStories went live this September 1st, with a Twitter account, PW fanfare, and a one-two punch of stories by Megan Stielstra and Paul M. Davis, both old hats at The Awesome. I’m stoked to read more – from you, maybe? (Of course people in Philly are still S.O.L. – to learn more, to get phone numbers, or to donate some money, visit Friends of the Free Library Philadelphia.)

Elaine Showalter, Richard Powers, George Saunders, Don DeLillo and Peter Carey all contributed to Granta Issue 108: Chicago. Run, do not walk to your local independent to purchase a copy. Tonight at the Stop Smiling Storefront, Granta,  Stop Smiling and Po-Fo celebrate the release with readings from Reginald Gibbons, Anne Winters, Diego Báez and David Trinidad. And it’s free, folks, totally free.

I was lucky enough to see a Granta event a few years ago at Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park, and it was excruciatingly great — to say nothing of the track record of Stop Smiling and Poetry events. They don’t mess around. It’d be criminal silly not to attend.

To get you in more of a froth, you can watch Granta’s hunky editor, John Freeman, talk up the issue:

Introducing “Chicago” from Granta magazine on Vimeo.