Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: A hostage situation at Rockaway Boulevard and 147th Street in Queens, a train job at East 180 St in the Bronx and a pedestrian was struck at West 66th and Amsterdam in Manhattan The disgruntled former employee who shot and killed a former supervisors and injured two others at Co-op City is claiming self-defense. The Politicker finds out that Lieutenant Governor David Paterson supports non-citizen voting (but Paterson is......

READING: Jonathan Franzen reads at the Bam Cafe tonight, but not after a buffet that include wine from the Pine Ridge Winery and other treats. There will also be a live acoustic performance and a Q&A with Franzen. The hefty price tag includes dinner, wine, tax, and tip. 6:30pm // BAM Cafe [30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn] // $45 THEATER: The first annual FRIGID Festival is breaking ice in the East Village at the Kraine, the......

MOVIES: Don't forget, the Bryant Park movies start tonight! The movie won't begin until sunset - which is about the same time the rain and thunder are scheduled to begin. Tonights features in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller, The Birds. Be an early bird (heh) and get there at 5 for a good spot on the lawn! 5pm // Bryant Park // Free ART: Like Sculpture? Like to hear people talk about it? Then attend MoMA's On......

This week kicks off tonight with Non-fiction night at KGB Bar (85 E. 4th St.) with Harry Brunius reading from Better for All the World : The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity and Cynthia Carr reading from Our Town: Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. It starts at 7PM and is free. On Thursday night (3/23), 7PM at Barnes and Noble (Broadway at......

Wow, Gothamist takes a break to re-read The Chronicle of Narnia and suddenly contemporary literature is rocked! The big stories: The Smoking Gun's expose on bestselling author James Frey's lie-laden memoir (and Oprah book), A Million Little Pieces, and the NY Times'investigation in JT Leroy, revealing he doesn't quite exist! Next, we'll find out JK Rowling is a marketing scheme cooked up by the British government! The Smoking Gun's article about Frey's lies seems so......

Over at Beatrice, Emily Gordon is blogging about this past weekend's New Yorker Festival. She puts Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith into the high school popularity paradigm, hears Steve Martin play banjo with Earl Scruggs and gets to revel in a Tom Cruise as dog impression. Gothamist didn't get to make it to this year's festival (we were a little slow to pull the intellectual cognoscentic trigger), but we will try to right that by......

Thanks to Product Shop NYC (who also reports that the New Year's Eve act at Madison Square Garden will be...The Black Crowes), Gothamist is salivating over this year's New Yorker Festival line-up. Edie Falco! The RZA! Ricky Gervais! Trey Parker and Matt Stone! Sleater-Kinney! And Wallce and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit! The New Yorker Festival runs September 23-25, and tickets will go on sale on August 25. The tickets range in price......

Dale Peck, Writer...

The publishing world is abuzz upon news of the Amazon error that showed reviewers' true identities (bad, technology, bad!) which, as Gawker aptly put it, "gave a little peek into the world of friends pimping friends' books and bitter unpublished writers trashing other writers. (It seems Amazon is sort of like, oh, any street corner in lower Manhattan.)" David Eggers was revealed to have written a review pimping friend Heidi Julavits' The Effects of Living......

The Association of American Publishers announced that Oprah Winfrey would be resuming the book club, but in a different form - this time, focusing on classics. "Speaking lovingly about the 'slow, sensual art of reading,' Oprah said that reading, especially reading great literary works, 'is my favorite gift to myself,'" which is a huge sigh of relief for the publishing industry (at least for the publishers with classics - better get some publicists on that......