This Week’s Readings: Gary Indiana, Women’s Day, and The Unspeakable

Monday
At the freshly renovated LGBT Community Center, Kevin Sessums will dish about his life in the trenches of NYC glamor, working for Andy Warhol at Interview and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair. His new book I Left it on the Mountain (a follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Mississippi Sissy) chronicles his professional life, including interviews with Madonna, Courtney Love and Daniel Radcliffe, along with his simultaneously crumbling personal life. No topic is deemed too dark for discussion, including the author’s nights of anonymous sex, his HIV positive diagnosis and his descent into addiction.
Monday, March 2. 6:30 p.m. LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street (West Village).

Iconic downtown novelist and filmmaker Gary Indiana has watched things change over the past few decades, but he’s not about to let a little gentrification sway his loyalty-he’s lived in the same East Village apartment for 35 years. Watch him read from his 2003 novel Do Everything in the Dark, and get your own copy of the newly published second edition, now available for purchase. The novel takes the reader back in time to the New York City art world of the ‘80s and ‘90s on the rollercoaster of the narrator’s memory in a story the Washington Post called “sordid and brilliant” with “dozens of passages of sharp insight and dark humor.”
Monday, March 2. 7 p.m. St. Marks Book Shop, 136 East Third Street (East Village). 

Tuesday
Meghan Daum, author of the 2001 best seller My Misspent Youth, has been compared to so many people that you’re bound to get excited about one of them. Nylon declared Daum her generation’s Joan Didion. Her humor is reminiscent of Nora Ephron’s, according to the McNally Jackson website. If she’s really “reminiscent of a slightly restrained David Sedaris,” then how can we miss her discussion of The Unspeakable: And Other Topics of Discussion? After all, according to Mother Jones watching her read from the book is “a bit like watching Zach Galifianakis act: funny and slightly unsettling.” Who can resist a mashup like that?
Part of Conversations on Practice, an ongoing series hosted by author and musician Glenn Kurtz. Tuesday, March 3. 7 p.m. McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street (Nolita).

Thursday
If the wait for season two of True Detective has got you hankering for a little mystery in your life, watch Josh Cook, contributor to Bookslut, The Rumpus and The Millions, share excerpts from his debut novel An Exaggerated Murder. Kirkus Review called it a “a beautifully written postmodern novel of deduction that merrily, wittily blows up its genre’s conventions while at the same time re-energizing possibilities for the 21st-century detective story.” Unlike Detective (which we loved for its unintentionally, brilliantly melodramatic moments), Cook puts the inherent kitschiness of the genre up front with a sleuth named Trike Augustine and the tagline “How can you solve a murder when the clues are so dumb?”
Thursday, March 5. 7 p.m. WORD bookstore, 126 Franklin Street (Greenpoint).

Sunday
Celebrate Women’s Day with tales of badass ladies in history whose stories you probably don’t know but should. In its newest installation in the series “The Faces Behind the Photos,” Infinite Variety Productions wants to introduce you to war Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke White, Dorothea Lange and Martha Gellhorn in their vivid retelling of their lives, in the women’s own words, acted out by IVP’s own resident actors.
Sunday, March 8. 1 p.m. Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (Noho).