Many recurring reading series in the cities are on summer hiatus, and the political discussions are heating up. Two readings with a global bent this week:

Monday, August 4, 2008, 7:00pm
KGB Bar (85 E. 4th Street btw 2nd and 3rd Aves.)
The Future of the Global Environmental Movement

Authors William Powers and Glenn Hurowitz get together today to discuss “the future of the global environmental movement.” Powers has worked in development aid and conservation, written for numerous publications, and is the author of of Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge and Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization. Hurowitz is the author of Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party and has also written for numerous publications and worked on many environmental and electoral campaigns.

Thursday, August 7, 2008, 6:30pm
The New School, Tishman Auditorium (66 West 12th Street )
Bringing Down the Great Firewall of China: Silenced Writers Speak on the Eve of the Olympics

The Olympic Games open on Friday in Beijing, while many of China’s writers and journalists remain in prison. PEN American Center and The New School present this reading of their work by a who’s who of famous PEN members and writers. They’ll include Edward Albee, Russell Banks, Philip Gourevitch, Jessica Hagedorn, Hari Kunzru, Rick Moody, and Francine Prose.

Monday, July 28, 2008, 7:00pm
The Half King Bar & Restaurant (505 W. 23rd Street at 10th Ave)
George Motz, Hamburger America

Filmmaker and hamburger expert George Motz will be at The Half King Monday to celebrate his book, Hamburger America. Go have a burger, a beer and wax nostalgic with the author. More here.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008, 7:00pm
McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry)
Eddie Campbell, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard

Cartoonist Eddie Campbell, author of The Fate of the Artist, and co-author of From Hell will present his new graphic novel, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (First Second Books), which is based on the acrobat who made the leotard a big deal.

Thursday, July 31, 2008, 7:00pm to 10:00pm
Central Park Summerstage (Enter at 69^th Street and Fifth Avenue)
Richard Price and Charles Bock

It’s LES meets Vegas Thursday at Summerstage. (This makes it sound like a WWE event). Richard Price will be reading from Lush Life, his most recent novel, and Charles Bock debut novel, Beautiful Children, has received a whole lot of attention. Go check the two of them out Thursday. More on both here.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 7:00pm
McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry)

Jonathan Segura Occupation HazardsSegura is the deputy fiction editor at Publishers Weekly, and this is his debut novel. It’s a “newsroom thriller” about a burnt out reporter who discovers a crime syndicate that might involve his employers. Is there a crime syndicate at PW? I don’t know, but the website says “wine will be served.”

Wednesday, July 23, 2008, 7:00pm
Housing Works (126 Crosby south of Houston)
Darin Strauss & A.M. Homes

Darin Strauss (More Than It Hurts You) and A.M. Homes (The Mistress’s Daughter) will be doing a reading, Q&A and signing.

Thursday, July 23, 2008, 7:00pm

KGB Bar (85 E. 4th Street between 2nd and 3rd Aves.)
The First Line Magazine

The First Line http://www.thefirstline.com/ is a literary magazine with a simple but grabbing premise: a first line is assigned for the issue, and all the submissions must begin with this line. They’ll be celebrating their 10-year anniversary at KGB on Thursday with readings from authors in the new anthology, The Best of The First Line: Editor’s Picks 2002-2006, and share some insights from writing for the magazine. The readers will be M. M. De Voe, Matt McHugh, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

July 18-20 (this Friday-Sunday) is the 10th Annual Harlem Book Fair. For a full list of events, go here.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008, 7:00pm
B&N Tribeca (97 Warren Street)
Michael Ian Black: My Custom Van

Michael Ian Black will be at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble Tuesday to read from (or discuss, or make fun of, or something) his new collection of essays, My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face. Sarah Silverman says it’s “Fun to read while you’re pooping.” That’s good enough for me.

Wednesday, July 16, 7:00pm
B&N Tribeca (97 Warren Street)
Grandmaster Flash

Two B&N events this week because they’re so good. Grandmaster Flash has a memoir out, Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats, and he’ll be at the Tribeca B&N Wednesday. Do I really need to say more than that?

Thursday, July 17, 7:00pm
McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry)
Dzanc Books and Friends

Dzanc Books is an upstart indie publisher. On Thursday Aaron Petrovich of Hotel St. George Press will host a reading by the contributing authors of Best of the Web (Dzanc Books), including Garth Risk Hallberg, Cara Hoffman, Sarah Sweeney, Justin Taylor, Tess Taylor, and Claudia Zuluaga. Joshua Kornreich will read from his novel The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars (Marick Press) and Peter Markus will read from Bob, or Man on Boat , published by Dzanc Books.

Thursday, July 10, 7:30pm
Solas Bar (232 E. 9^th Street btw 3^rd and 2^nd Aves)
St. Mark’s Reading Series featuring Ed Park and Leni Zumas

More Ed Park (Editor of Believer Magazine and New-York Ghost, and now author of Personal Days), along with Leni Zumas (Farewell Navigator: Stories).

Friday, July 11, 7:00pm
McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry)
David Browne & Thurston Moore

It’s Sonic Youth night on Friday at McNally Robinson as founding member Thurston Moore and writer David Browne (Goodbye 20^th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth) come together to discuss the New York underground scene in the 70s and 80s as well as the band. The website says there might be audio and video. Moore is the author of several books, most recently No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980. and the eponymous and brief moment in music in New York. Browne is a journalist and author, and his book gives the history of Sonic Youth and its influence on the scene.

 
Monday, June 30, 7:00pm
Housing Works Used Bookstore & Café (126 Crosby Street, South of Houston)
BOMB Magazine presents: Victoria Redel and Honor Moore

BOMB Magazine presents BOMBLive from time to time, and this Monday there will be a talk between Victoria Redel (The Border of Truth) and Honor Moore (The Bishop’s Daughter) “about fathers and daughters, fiction and memory.” With a Q+A and signing. Should be interesting.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008
McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry)
Marcus Reeves & Alec Forge on Hip Hop and Radio

In case you missed the last Marcus Reeves’s (Somebody Scream!: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power) event that I mentioned, here’s another, equally interesting. He will be talking with Alec Foege, author of Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio, about hip-hop and commercial radio on Wednesday.

Wednesday, June 25, 8:00pm
Happy Ending Reading Series (Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome Street)

Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Reading Series ends out Wednesday with readings from Marisa Silver (The God of War), Nicholas Dawidoff (The Crowd Sounds Happy), and Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake) and music by Nina Katchadourian. Each author is asked to do one risky thing, and the musician to play one cover. Always a fun, smart time.

Thursday, June 26, 7:30pm
St. Mark’s Reading Series @ Solas Bar (232 E. 9th Street btw. 2nd and 3rd Aves)
Continuum 33 1/3rd Reading

Three authors from Continuum’s 33 1/3^rd series will read at Solas on Thursday: LD Beghtol (Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs), Franklin Bruno (Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces) and Elizabeth Vincentelli (Abba Gold).

Tuesday, June 17, 7:00pm
Housing Works Used Bookstore & Café (126 Crosby St, South of Houston)
Francisco Goldman and David Lida on Mexico City and Latin America

David Lida (First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capitol of the 21^st Century) talks with Francisco Goldman (The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?) about Mexico City and Latin America Tuesday at Housing Works.

Thursday, June 19, 6:30 – 8:30pm
McNally Robinson (52 Prince Street between Lafayette and Mulberry)
Joseph O’Neill (Netherland) in conversation with Pantheon editor Deborah Garrison

A post 9/11 novel based in New York has a lot of opportunity to falter, but I’ve heard good things about Netherland. It’s the story of a European man living here and dealing with all that entails, having ambiguous feelings about his adopted town. Joseph O’Neill has written two other novels and a family history and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. Thursday he’ll talk with his editor Deborah Garrison about fiction and the editorial process.

Thursday, June 19, 7:00pm
BookCourt (163 Court Street in Brooklyn)
Nam Le (The Boat) with Liza Monroy (Mexican High)

Nam Le, author of the much-talked-about and much-acclaimed debut collection of short stories The Boat, is in town to do a few events. He was born in Vietnam and raised in Autstralia, and the short stories in this collection range from the semi-autobiographical story about a character name Nam struggling to complete his master’s at Iowa to stories based in Colombia and Tehran. It’s on my to-read pile. If you can’t make it Thursday, you can check his website for more events in New York and elsewhere, here. You can also read the short story “Tehran Calling” online at fivechapters.com. Thursday he will be reading with Liza Monroy, whose first novel is Mexican High, of which you can read more about here.

“Tr: To Drink and To Penetrate Jubilantly,” Jean Faucheur

Every time I turn a corner into a bookstore, at least a dozen new graffiti books threaten my faith in this form. Ostensibly “art books,” these publications simply flood shelves with terrible photographs of mediocre wheatpaper posters and wall-scrawls as empty as the cans that were wasted on them. Art book? No — and it undercuts the value of graffitti to give these paperweights that pretense.

Then there are the gems, few and far between. Graffiti Paris, available this month from Abrams, is not exactly a gem, however. It suffers from the kind of documentary, head-on photography that leaves the graphic in the frame but little else, decontextualizing the work from the neighborhood that produced it. Especially in Paris, where geography permeates identity, that context is key.

But Graffiti Paris is still one of the better books out there. Paris is full of strong, living, fighting and politicized graffiti and Fabienne Grévy, the art historian and photographer who created Graffiti Paris, has a great eye for picking the quality pieces off a wall overrun by quantity.

As Grévy notes in the introduction, Graffiti Paris includes photographs taken over the last 15 years. The project’s priority was to preserve a record of Paris street art from the 1990s and late-80s, street art that will soon be worn away. In other words, the point here was never to make an “art book” exactly and, as a record of some of the best graffiti to grace The City of Lights in the past decade, Graffiti Paris is really rather good!

Before pulling on that mask and shaking the spray can in preparation for greatness, before gracing the walls of countless buildings in efforts to share your vision and voice with the public, before any work of art there is a beginning. But there is rarely any documentation of these beginning stages and the intricate processes of the influential Graffiti genre.

Seeking to correct this are Sacha Jenkins — creator of Ego Trip Magazine and the White Rapper Show — and David Villorente, who have compiled Piecebook: Secret Drawings of Graff Writers, a book of sketches and rough drafts done by graffiti artists such as Dondi, Lee, T Kid, Lady Pink, IZ The Wiz, Kel 1st, Seen UA, Ali, Daze, Skeme, Noc 167, Cey, Part TDS, Don 1,West, Caine One, Mare, and many others.

On June 12th, Sacha Jenkins in collaboration with acclaimed artist Chino BYI and 10 Deep will put the book on display in a gallery reception for its release. The event takes place at Reed Space in New York City from 8-10pm.

For more information on how you can attend click here.