author readings plus a plea for assistance

I have attended literally hundreds of author readings. "Attended" is the wrong word. Hosted, is more like it. As manager of the Bull's Head Bookshop, I've hosted readings for authors who are real authors and authors who know that they are not real authors and authors who are not real authors but think that they are. (This last sentence was after Getrude Stein from her "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," an amusing book.)

Some readings are memorable because of author quirkiness. Dave Eggers, for example, asked our store to provide him with a cot (he claimed exhaustion) and then read from said cot. Chuck Palahniuk's ardent wish that his selection would gross someone out to the point that s/he fainted came true. Ethan Hawke autographed a young woman's stomach, at her request.

Some readings are memorable because of the charm of the author and selection as well as the way s/he reads it. Mark Salzman read from his beautiful "Lying Awake" and then told a wittily self-deprecating story about his cat and some aluminum foil. Abraham Verghese read from his inestimable "My Own Country" and then
listened carefully to the AIDS stories of every tearful person in the long line. Zadie Smith read beautifully from her beautiful book "On Beauty" in her beautiful accent looking totally beautiful. Kaye Gibbons did her first reading ever from her first novel, "Ellen Foster," at the Bull's Head.

I've attended enough readings to want to make mine the charming, not-too-long,
not-too-serious sorts of them. I'm all about trying for amusing. I'm not afraid of a
little well-placed coarseness. (My novel is about a wet nurse. A little coarseness is going to be hard to avoid. I may as well embrace it.)

In light of all this, I'm hoping for some help. I need every synonym I can get my hands on (if you will) for the word, "breast." Every one. All of them. I hope I can depend upon you all for your support in what is sure to be an titillating endeavor. I thank you.

galleys

Galleys arrived today prompting a big dinner out at the Acme Restaurant in Carrboro. Some years ago I attended an author dinner at the Acme. We local booksellers had been invited, by the author's publisher, to dinner in order to meet said author and get to know him and get to like him. I'm usually very prompt, like I have to wait outside in my car til it's time to go into a place so I don't look to dweeby for being so early, but in this case I was way late. I was at home. It was midsummer. 

When I saw the time and realized my mistake, I ran into the garden and cut down all the sunflowers--gorgeous tall ones--to take to the author in a gigantic bouquet as an apology. He loved them. He said they reminded him of the sunflowers that grew alongside the reservation in Oklahoma, which was the subject of a lot of his work. 

Some months later I read in PW that he'd been found to be a fraud, that his whole memoir was one of those made-up kind of memoirs. I didn't care. I loved the fact that even if it wasn't true that he'd spent a bunch of time on a reservation, that he'd had the presence of mind to envision those sunflowers growing alongside the imaginary road. 

My galleys look pretty good.