Edwidge and the Angry inch: It’s reading season, when we try to behave like the secular urban intellectuals the red states think we are after a summer spent devouring nanny lit in sunburned stupor on the beach! Hence the smugly erudite New Yorker Festival, featuring that fuzz-domed p*ssyhound Malcolm Gladwell. … But first! Novelist-memoirist Kathryn Harrison, who made her name about a decade ago with that dirty book about diddling her daddy, reads from the manuscript of her forthcoming tome, While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family, a true-crime-ish inquiry into the 1984 murders of an abusive couple by their 18-year-old son, who also offed the sister. We gave Ms. Harrison a jangle. “It plays into my desire to reveal the entire spectrum of human behavior and show that any one of us is capable of anything,” she said. “It’s really sort of, ‘But for the grace of God.’ You don’t know what you would do in other people’s circumstances.” During the course of her research, Ms. Harrison spent time with the murderer, Billy Gilley, currently in jail in (again!) Oregon—“If my parents had given me that name, I probably would’ve killed them, too,” she said dryly; we’re not touchin’ that one—and his surviving sister, now in her 30’s. Also tonight, Haitian-American novelist and total babe Edwidge Danticat reads on the Upper East Side.
[Kathryn Harrison at Hunter College, West Building, 8th floor, southwest corner of 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, 7:30 p.m., RSVP required, 212-772-4007; Edwidge Danticat at the 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, 8 p.m., www.92y.org;]
