TONIGHT: Punk Lit at the Brookline Booksmith

Brookline Booksmith dedicates an evening to literary zeitgeist with a killer double bill. First up is local academic LEORA LEV, whose Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper is the first critical collection of essays on the author of the George Miles novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period), which typify his wall-of-assault psychosexual prose. Enter includes a never-before-published piece by William S. Burroughs as well as essays by Michael Cunningham, John Waters, and Pitchfork and Village Voice contributor BRANDON STOSUY, who knows a thing or two about NYC’s erstwhile avant-garde literary community, having compiled photographs, old poems, short stories, and work from journals, ’zines, and magazine covers to chronicle 18 years in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, which doubles as a visual and written subculture archive. Accounting for both the recognizable — like Dennis Cooper — and forgotten figures who ran in NYC’s literary bohemia, Up Is Up is part gallery, part cultural map. Get downtown with Lev and Stosuy at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.