Tomorrow (Tuesday) night, LibraryThing will be hosting a party!

Kevin Shay—first-time novelist, long-time essayist and humorist, hacker, high school friend of mine—is going to be reading from his novel The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety.

The reading is at 7:00 at Longfellow Books in Portland, ME (Google map). After the reading (8?), we’ll be hosting a liquor-and-cheese party at the LibraryThing offices. Anyone familiar with the parties that Lisa and I used to throw will know the kind of Martha-Stewart-meets-Burning-Man event we’re talking about here. Unfortunately, I’m planning it, not Lisa, so there will be no oregano goat cheese balls. But you’ll get to talk to Kevin, meet the LibraryThing crew (including the new mystery employee)!

Here a review by the L.A. Times, and here’s the flap copy:

It’s 1998. Or, as Randall Knight sees it, Y2K minus two. Randall, a twenty-five-year-old children’s singer and puppeteer, has discovered the clock is ticking toward a worldwide technological cataclysm. But he may still be able to save his loved ones—if he can convince them to prepare for the looming catastrophe. That’s why he’s quit his job, moved into his car, and set out to sound the alarm.

The End as I Know It follows Randall on his coast-to-coast Cassandra tour. His itinerary includes the elementary schools that have booked him as a guest performer and the friends and relatives he must awaken to the crisis. When nobody will heed his warning, Randall spirals into despair and self-destruction as he races from one futile visit to the next. At the end of his rope, he lands with a family of newly minted survivalists in rural Texas. There, he meets a woman who might help him transcend his millennial fears and build a new life out of the shards of his old one.

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