This is the first post on our new blog,  “Booked” — where I’ll be sending updates on my 22-city book tour.  Think of it as your behind-the-scenes look at the least exciting of all the performance arts:public readings!

A book tour is a mixed bag: part Spinal Tap, part—well, I guess there is no other part. So it’s just a bag. I don’t mean, or have any right, to complain; there’s nothing more pompous than an author whining about having to go on tour.  But if I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times: Put the writer’s name first, the puppet show after.

Of Jews and Love Matches

I started my tour three weeks before my book comes out – excellent planning! – and at one of the most stressful events there is: the Jewish Book fair try-out. Run by a generous woman from Long Island named Carolyn Hessel, the tryout has been called a combination of speed-dating and “The Gong Show.”  I, and about seventy other writers, got two minutes each to pitch our books to hundreds of Jewish Community Center representatives from around the country. (If they like you, you're picked to go on a Jewish book tour.)  We all gathered in a large auditorium in Los Angeles’s “American Jewish University”—who knew such a place existed? And what does that do Brandeis’s confidence? 

 Darin Strauss hits the road for in support of his new novel, "More Than It Hurts You." A calendar: