Book Tours

By Andrea Sachs

TREND Book tours are getting funkier, with authors providing performance sizzle

HOW IT STARTED MTV Generation writers, bored, decided to spice things up

JUDGMENT CALL If Oprah can make books fun, why not? It's not your father's bookstore anymore

Going on a book tour is pure glamour, right? Not so fast. For many authors, book tours are a blur of hotels and bookstores at warp speed. Maybe that's why literary America is loosening its tie and letting its hair down. Best-selling memoirist Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) is becoming famous for appearances that are close to performance art. At one point he brought two dermatologists on stage to explain itching and scratching.

Others are catching the acting bug. Author Jonathan Ames appeared in a literary boxing match and ended up with a broken nose. Authors Matthew Klam and Lucinda Rosenfeld did a reading at TSE, an exclusive Madison Avenue shop, donning the store's pricey cashmere togs. Novelist Rick Moody has even served as the opening act for a rock band, the Magnetic Fields.

But no one has turned the traditional author tour on its head more than DANIEL HANDLER, the wildly popular children's author known as Lemony Snicket. When Handler arrives at a reading, he announces to the children that the mysterious Snicket couldn't make it, and that he has been sent in Snicket's place. He also tells the young attendees that the books are terrible and that they shouldn't be reading them. Naturally, this subversive behavior sets off gales of laughter in the junior set. "Slowly, the children usually figure out that I'm somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody," says Handler, who also plays a mean accordion for them. "It's a lot of fun."

--By Andrea Sachs