Evidently the literary set is not daunted by forecasts of a blizzard. It was supposed to snow up to 10 inches in Manhattan on Tuesday, which might have deterred partygoers from showing up to AIR MAIL and MCD x FSG’s celebration of Sloane Crosley’s forthcoming memoir, Grief Is for People. Yet the flurries abated by midafternoon, and no amount of slush or nippy weather could stand in the way of the attendees who streamed into the Waverly Inn come evening time.
AIR MAIL Co-Editors Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley held court by the entrance, while Salman Rushdie and his wife, the novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, occupied a cocktail table across the room from Griffin Dunne and the film producer Laura Bickford.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Mitzi Angel mingled with Knopf editor in chief Jordan Pavlin and executive editor Edward Kastenmeier and Gallery Books editorial director Aimée Bell, and New York magazine’s David Haskell, Carl Swanson, and Shawn McCreesh chatted with former New York Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers and The New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum.
Guests also included the novelists Bill Goldstein, A. M. Homes, Susan Minot, and Gary Shteyngart; the writers Lili Anolik, Thessaly La Force, Naomi Fry, Jon-Jon Goulian, and Christian Lorentzen; the art adviser Will Kopelman; the comedian Alex Edelman; Audrey Gelman, of the Wing; the book-publicity queen Sandi Mendelson and her daughter the Belletrist co-founder Karah Preiss; the downtown publicist Kaitlin Phillips; and AIR MAIL columnists and men-about-town George Hahn and Dana Brown.
Crosley’s newest book is a somber affair, but this reception reflected the signature humor and lightheartedness she brings to everything she does. “Well,” as one AIR MAIL editor said as she grabbed her coat at the end of the night, “that was fun.”
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL