Danny M. Lavery

3 weeks ago | thechatner.com | Danny M. Lavery

The Chatner is entirely supported by paying readers, whose generosity has now enabled me to write three novels in three years, and keep baby Rocco supplied with a near-endless supply of bananas. (He likes to carry the peel around with him after he’s finished like a blanket) My potassium-enriched son and I thank you fulsomely. If you become a paying member, you get access to a wealth of subscribers-only writing (I also take requests, so email me whenever you like with your demands).

1 month ago | thechatner.com | Danny M. Lavery

I like to walk around a lot. Writing, you sit down all day, so it really helps to take a lot of walks and break things up. A few years ago I picked up this secondhand jacket in Cobble Hill because I wanted something reflective when I go walking around at night. It’s an old Walls hunting jacket with a zippered, removable “game pouch” on the back. It cost twenty-eight dollars and I wear it almost every day. I like the jacket for a few reasons.

1 month ago | thechatner.com | Danny M. Lavery

I have made no secret of my affection for the Now You See Me franchise. (“I love the version of mental vulnerability that exists in these movies, where all it takes to be rendered perfectly hypnotized is for someone to say something like "WATCH my WATCH and SLEEP," like everyone's got a psychic fontanelle; it felt like watching a Scientology video.”)I have borne with great patience the nine-year wait between the second and third installments in the series.

1 month ago | thechatner.com | Danny M. Lavery

Everybody loves the complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir – the question is, what will you read next, after you’ve finished the original series? Where should your next fix of Bronze Age-era complaints, at once timeless and at a great remove, come from? Let us begin with the archive of lettters to Zenon, a court treasurer’s private secretary during the reign of Ptolemy II in Egypt during the 3rd century BCE.

1 month ago | thechatner.com | Danny M. Lavery

This weekend marked my fourth book festival this year. I’ve had a terrific time at each one, and hope to speak at many more, but I do have a strong suspicion at this point that everyone who attends a book festival, either as a panelist, a bookseller, a reader, an author, an agent, or all of the above, is already sold on the power of storytelling. The same is almost certainly true for the power of the imagination, and the power of words (or “the written word” if you’re really laying it on thick).