As I mentioned in Reading Tonight, this is the last day of Pilot Books' Small Press Fest, a 31-day long experiment in which Pilot Books hosted at least one different small press reader every night of the month. I've attended a bunch of readings there this month, but the one I most regret not being able to attend is Doug Nufer's reading (LiveJournal on: I caught the cold that's going around that manifests as a twenty-three-day-long-sore-throat and it really kicked my ass this weekend. I slept pretty much the whole two days away. LiveJournal off.) Luckily, my intern, J.T. Oldfield, went to the reading, and she's brought back exciting news about Nufer's upcoming novel. Here's her report:

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Here’s a benefit of getting to a smallish reading early: Perhaps you will be the third person there and whomever is supposed to be manning the store has stepped out and locked the door, and you will introduce yourself to Doug Nufer who is also waiting to get into the store, and he will tell you interesting stories about various readings. One time, he was locked out of another reading event, so they everyone went down the street and read at a wine shop. Another time, he hosted a reading titled “A Leg to Stand On” at the space above the Artificial Limb Company.

After the door was unlocked, more people showed up, and Nufer finally got up to read, it was like an explosion of words went off and parts of my frontal lobe woke the fuck up. Anyone who is interested in the spoken word should see this man in action. He embodies not just the characters, but the tone of whichever work he is reading.

Nufer read from Novel Double/Double Novel, as well as We Were Werewolves. But then he treated us to a sample of the book he’s working on, which is due out in 2011. It’s a sort of metafiction about greyhound racing and methods of betting, which—Method as Nufer is—he put to the test over the course of a year. He says its “an experiment novel based on an experiment”. Suddenly, next year can’t get here fast enough.