Orange Alert Press reading love, Songs of Insurgency and Joey Ramone.

Much awesomeness to touch on including, but not limited to the fact that last night was the inaugural Orange Alert Press reading at The Whistler and it rocked, big time, and for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the killer line-up - the great local writer and terribly handsome Robert Duffer who read a new piece he's working on, the quite cool Stephanie Kuehnert author of the awesomely well-received novel I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, read from her forthcoming novel Ballads of Suburbia, and maybe our favorite local live reader Spencer Dew read a new piece as well called Why I am a Catholic. So yes, quite happening, and yes, much newness going on, but we also want to take a moment to touch on two additional and not so tangential topics. First, we have finished engorging ourselves on the killer paranoia driven near tales of love lost, crushed and stroked that comprise Spencer's short story collection Songs of Insurgency and loved it to say the least, so go buy it, please, it just may change your life, and two, our book review/interview with Jew Punk Steven Lee Beeber author of the most excellent Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's and editor of the wonderfully tortured insomnia anthology AWAKE! which is titled If I could sleep, I would dream about Joey Ramone - you see the tie-in, right, nice - is now live and begging to be read, so we would be thrilled if you chose to read that too. Though no pressure or anything, we're just saying.

Jewish punks and insomnia. What else could you want?

We are most happy to have met writer and way cool dude Steven Lee Beeber who has not one, but two books out that we are very excited to read. The first is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's - A Secret History of Jewish Punks, which we are quite stoked about, and the second is a book Steven edited for Soft Skull, yes that Soft Skull, called Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless, which looks like much fun and is not only filled with many authors we all know and love including Jonathan Messinger, Jonathan Ames, Aimee Bender, Neil Pollack and many, many more, but includes an awesome Beeber riff on Vinnie Spano. Yes, the Vinnie Spano. We will let you know what we think about the books when we get through them, but in the interim why not go out and get them anyway? On the one hand, you get to support independent media. On the other, you get to feel good about yourself for doing so. And what could beat that? Not much, well besides re-watching Indian Summer of course.