HAPPENING TONIGHT // Vol.1 Brooklyn Serves Up Savory Bites Of Literary Culture

If you're into the Brooklyn literary scene, there's a good chance that you're already familiar with Vol.1 Brooklyn, a local blog that's picked up quite a following since it began in 2009. Vol.1 features everything from daily literature and culture links to book reviews and fiction. We particularly love Sunday Stories, an ongoing series of fiction and nonfiction pieces, and the Band Booking series, in which bands field questions about what they've been reading.

We caught up with the site's founder, Jason Diamond to ask him about Vol.1. "It was honestly just supposed to be a blog where myself and a few of my friends could talk about things we liked," he says. "Those things usually tend to be books and records, or things having to do with books and records. For some reason a lot of people started reading it, and I was also setting up reading events for the heck of it, and I thought, 'We should combine these things.'"

At Vol.1's readings, which have taken place at venues such as WORD, Brooklyn Winery and Bar Matchless, there's a good chance you'll catch a writer's work before it hits the big time. "It's awesome to watch a writer read for us from a manuscript they're working on, and then a year later they end up selling it," Diamond says. "Or when somebody tells me they wrote something for a Vol. 1 event that later ended up getting published for a really big magazine or journal. That's always really awesome." Vol.1 has also presented unique events such as The Greatest Three-Minute Food Stories and The Future of What?: A Panel on Punk in the 1990s.

It doesn't sound like Vol.1 is looking to turn a profit with its literary and culture explorations, but they wouldn't mind a little free caffeine. "If somebody would please foot the bill for all the coffee we drink to make Vol. 1 work, we'd gladly mention your product in our posts," Diamond says.

Tonight you can catch Vol.1 Brooklyn's latest literary throwdown, The Greatest 3-Minute Stories About The 90s, at Bar Matchless in Greenpoint. It will feature writers such as the Village Voice's Maura Johnston, Fluxblog's Matthew Perpetua, the Paris Review's Sadie Stein and Rob Tannenbaum, co-author of the acclaimed I Want My MTV.

-- John Ruscher