Friday, August 21, 2009

LaValle at McNally

by Daryl Edelman

He's funny and thoughtful and opened his first free reading from his third book, Big Machine, by showing the first fifteen minutes of John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing, popcorn included, at McNally Jackson Booksellers in Little Italy last Tuesday.

The story shows the mythical origins of a religion among many, a sort of spiritual X-Men, LaValle told the respectable-sized crowd before reading excerpts from his latest book.


The hero, Ricky Rice, a bathroom janitor by trade, receives a mysterious letter, quits his job, and begins his Homeric journey on a Greyhound bus across America.


Mona Lisa smiled with LaValle's good humor.

Hypnotized by the beauty of human instinct that LaValle conjured, we were drawn into the mystic journey of self-awareness that took him seven years to write--Big Machine.