Last Friday night found most of the Tor.com staff piling into cabs in search of a semi-mythical place called Red Hook, where author (and occasional Tor.com blogger) Brian Francis Slattery was throwing a release party for his excellent second novel, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America.
Red Hook is an odd place: it’s close to Manhattan, but somehow impossible to get to. It’s a secret little pocket of Brooklyn, jutting out into the East River, away from its more thoroughly gentrified 
neighbors. It’s also the only piece of land in New York that directly faces the Statue of Liberty (since the statue is positioned so that she’s always looking back toward France, her place of origin). Which means that if you want to look Lady Liberty square in the eye, you go to Red Hook—a fact which should seem immediately relevant to anyone familiar with Slattery’s previous novel, Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, or Liberation, both of which can be considered complex, quasi-apocalyptic, multilayered love songs to New York City and to the vast expanse of the America beyond.
[Below the fold, video of Slattery’s performance—sans mullet wigs.]
I met 
