from The LA Times

The opening celebration for ‘The Rattling Wall’

Rattlingwall_hammer

Maybe all readings should let the bar open before getting underway.

Whether it was helped by the wine and beer or not, Wednesday night’s kickoff of the new literary journal “The Rattling Wall” was a festive celebration. Held at the Hammer Museum, the room was filled to its 250-person capacity, with stylish young literati, well-heeled PEN stalwarts, and the contributors, who fell, demographically, somewhere between the two.

The Rattling Wall” is a print literary journal published biannually, supported by PEN Center USA West, and edited by PEN’s program director Michelle Meyering. The first issue, which includes a whopping 36 contributors, features fiction by James Frey, Blake Butler and Tod Goldberg; poetry by Tony Hoagland and Matthew Zapruder; and travel essays by Samantha Dunn and Don Winslow.

Although most of Wednesday night’s readers hail from the West Coast, Meyering hinted at the magazine’s ambitions when she told the audience that she looked forward to “building a national community of readers and writers around the journal.”

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