Actually, it is pretty funny already New York’s Lynne Tillman returns with Someday This Will Be Funny, a collection of short works from upstart press Red Lemonade. Collection highlight “More Sex” is a brazen litany while the epic “Love Sentence” turns prodigious literary quoting into an obsessive game of identity. If there’s one author I could compare her writing to, it’s Samuel Beckett, though her full-blooded text looks nothing like his. Maybe it’s because Beckett once wrote a line in Endgame that seems a shared, vital idea between the two authors: “There is nothing funnier than unhappiness.” 
After the peep show Toronto’s Hal Niedzviecki takes leave from cultural commentary work (where he was accepted into Oprah’s Bounteous Book Club) to release a collection of short-fiction, Look Down This Is Where It Must Have Happened. Niedzviecki is an absolutely shameless and fearless writer and one whose fiction has always existed just outside the various gated communities of literary Canada. His contemporary parables – ranging from a fetus that demands to be aborted to an undergrad accidentally founding a terrorist network – are sure to cause exquisite discomfort for the too comfortable. 
The real Sontags of New York As the New York Times reports, a new memoir from author Sigrid Nunez is an intimate look inside Susan Sontag’s household, gleaned during the 1970s when Nunez worked for Sontag and dated her son. According to the review, Sempre Susan is a “short, baffling book” composed of “revenge laced with worship.” Still, it seems full of intriguing, if random, trivia, ranging from failed radical chic – Sontag could tear a strip off any less-than-obsequious waiter – to bacon binges. No matter, I’ve loved her since I had her author photo from Against Interpretation – grrrrrr – tacked up on my teenage wall. What other late-critic still inspires such fealty? Are there Lionel Trilling posters out there? I think not. The Type Books fifth anniversary party In Toronto, Type Books celebrates its fifth anniversary by welcoming 18 authors, including Gil Adamson and Andrew Pyper, into its cozy space at the foot of Trinity Bellwoods Park. Five years in the life of a bookstore? That’s like 36 human years. Saturday, April 30, 883 Queen W, Toronto, 416-366-8973, 11 am-6 pm, Free
