Melville House Books

Literary readings are fleeting things. Ten, fifteen, twenty people gather, they hear someone read too-fast or too-softly from a book, and then everyone disperses. In New York there are too many readings and we are always missing something interesting; in other parts of the country, the opportunities to see an author read are few and far between. It takes a great deal of time, money, and resources to arrange for a literary event, and typically they draw an audience numbered in the tens. In order to reach larger audiences (and create a literary record) some bookstores, like San Francisco’s Booksmith, have begun to livestream and archive their readings. Likewise, Google‘s “author@Google” series offers some interesting author readings to an internet audience. Still, while it’s nice to have these readings saved from their ephemeral fate, these video readings tend to be rather dull…

Mallory Rice, the new books editor at NYLON, recently introduced us to Teleportal Readings, a new virtual reading series that is seeking to make an internet-based reading something you actually enjoy sitting through. Here’s a poetry reading by Dean Young to give you a taste of what they’re doing:

Nathan Ihara is a publicist at Melville House. Previously, he was a book critic for the LA Weekly.