Word On The Street
This summer, there are a number of ways to get your literature on, and today offered the chance to do it in a shady park, or the sanctified splendor of a Chelsea Church. Bryant Park presents the [Word for Word Lunchtime Reading Series], which opened earlier this month and occurs every Wednesday through August 22, at 12:30pm. The series gives you a chance to hear noted authors read in the [Bryant Park Reading room](http://www.bryantpark.org/amenities/readingroom.php), an outdoor library of sorts that was originally conceived in 1935 as a way for jobless Depression-era professionals to spend the daytime hours, no questions asked. The lunchtime series doesnt require you to be unemployed, but Im sure no one would care if you were. Today featured Bill Geist reading from his book Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America. Next week at the same time, memoirists Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Carole Radziwell, Kevin Sessums, and Danielle Trussoni read. Stephanie Klein hosts (42nd street between 5th and 6th Avenues).
And tonight, for one night only, finds New Yorker humorist Ian Frazier and Sue Shapiro (Only as Good as Your Word, Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic) hosting the [13th annual Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen reading], from 7 to 9 pm. The members of the soup kitchens writers workshop wrote essays, poems and stories that are immortalized in Food For The Soul: Selections From The Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen Writers Workshop. This event and the Word for Word series are both absolutely free. Fortunately, times have changed since the Great Depression, but it's good to know the city's literary elite are still looking out for the cash-strapped among us.
Photo courtesy of [TooTallToddHK ]on flickr