The Brooklyn Rail

To celebrate author Jaime Clarke’s four-day literary residency at KGB Bar, April 22–25, 2025, Jaime asked some of his favorite writers to reminisce about the legendary venue.

KGB Bar was like a second home to me in the late 1990s. My fellow Bennington MFA alum David Ryan and I faithfully attended the weekly fiction reading series, just showing up without even knowing who was reading (you could always count on hearing great work). My first memory of KGB was not a reading, but a book party. Like many young male writers, I wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis, and was lucky enough to enter his orbit when I moved to New York, so much so that he invited me to a book party for a new novel by a young writer—The Mao Game by Joshua Miller, who was also the actor who played the young kid in River’s Edge. I improbably found myself at pre-book party drinks with Bret and Jay McInerney at the long-defunct East Village bar Pop, an amused spectator as Bret and Jay kidded each other as old friends do. I remember staying a step behind (but close enough to eavesdrop!) as we sauntered from Pop to KGB, and when we finally ascended the stairs, the room was filled with young male wannabes just like me—an unsettling reveal. I remember sudden distaste for the entire scene, save for the bar itself, a literary cocoon I tried never to leave for too long in the years that followed.
—Jaime Clarke

Ken Foster
When I started the KGB readings back in 1994, I had no idea what I was doing, which I think is also the thing I had going for me. I started by inviting writers that I admired, not knowing if they would say yes or not. Once things got going, I got to invite people I was curious about, people that others suggested. Curiosity was what we all had in common, as organizers and audience members. There were people who might only show up in the audience when there was a name on the bill, but there were a lot of people who came every week to see whoever was reading, knowing nothing about them in advance. And people read works in progress, sometimes passages that didn’t really work at all, but there was an appreciation for the work even when the work wasn’t working. I think for a lot of us, it was a masterclass in how to be a writer. And it was free.

Amy Hempel
I always had a good time when I read at KGB. But the best time there was when I went to hear Chuck Palahniuk read. He had been very kind to me in print, and I was a big fan of his fearless, mordant work, but we had not met in person. I brought my pal Lucy Grealy, and we didn’t get there early enough to even manage standing in the hall; there were people lined up down the stairs—probably a code violation, but no one was willing to leave. Chuck gave a powerhouse reading, and was then swarmed by the audience wanting books signed. After a while, I introduced myself, and Chuck, his then agent, Lucy, and I went to a nearby bar for a drink. Lovely night. Before long, I mentioned to Chuck in an email that I was newly on the board of a starting-out dog rescue, mostly working to save and find homes for pit bulls since there were so many of them in danger. I mentioned it as part of a longer message, but the next day Chuck mailed a check to the rescue in the amount of ten thousand dollars. I already knew he was very generous in promoting other writers, but this was something else. We saved lives with his surpassingly generous donation. Chuck saved those lives.

Rick Moody
I read there probably a dozen times back in the day, maybe even more, maybe eighteen or so, and it was a real home for me. I really felt esteemed by that joint, and it helped that it was SRO [standing room only] with an audience of twenty. I was really grateful for all that they gave me, and I still am.

Jonathan Ames
My memories are all mush.  A cross between applesauce and faded postcards. I feel like I’ve forgotten more of my life than I’ve remembered. But I do recall the KGB Bar. I used to love to go to readings there. The key was to arrive early so you didn’t have to stand. I also liked to stop in there once in a while, when there were no readings, and drink one of those exotic, long-necked Russian beers, which seemed extra strong because they were Russian and maybe they were extra strong. I miss those days. Pre-internet. Magazines and newspapers and readings at the KGB Bar. I didn’t realize that time wouldn’t last forever. We never realize that. So I better appreciate the right now… which won’t last forever, either. Still, it would be fun to time-travel, to walk back up those stairs to KGB, to be a young fool again instead of an old fool. Well, Thornton Wilder said it best in Our Town: “Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?/ Stage Manager: No. [pause] The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”

Amy Sohn
Ned Vizzini was one of my New York Press friends. He was going to Stuyvesant High School around the same time as my brother, around 1996. His pieces would show up in the Press and I was mystified that anyone could be that good that young. He started at fourteen or fifteen. He had a line in one piece about seeing a quarter on the subway floor and thinking that it had been in someone’s mouth. When we met at the New York Press Christmas party at the Puck Building we both wrote about it. There is an illustration of me like a Crumb girl and Ned like Dennis the Menace with his eyes up to my boobs. 

I didn’t really offer to take his virginity, or if I did it was because there was an open bar and I was in my whiskey sours phase. After the Press, Ned did well in Hollywood like William Monahan. No one resented his mainstream success because we loved him and he kept his voice and he was always modest when we saw him around. 

After he took his life I think it was Jonathan Ames who called me. I didn’t know about the depression. We said over and over that we couldn’t believe it and then we reminisced about our other old Press friends. 

Michael Gentile and maybe John Strausbaugh put something together at KGB with Ned’s editors and with Sabra and asked a bunch of us to read.

Ned was the most rich and successful alumnus of the Press besides me. I spent a lot of money on booze, women, and fast cars—the rest I just squandered. 

At the memorial at KGB I saw Sam Sifton and Gentile and Strausbaugh I think. We read his pieces aloud. I felt sad and happy at once. Sam called me Sohn like in the old days and I didn’t want to leave.

Charles Bock
KGB’s Sunday night reading series was a big fucking deal, they got writers with all kinds of cachet and heat behind them, and as I worked on my first book, I developed an intermittent habit—first seeing if I could get a copy of the novel at half price in the Strand basement, then heading to KGB, where maybe I’d get it signed. The guy who ran the series had excellent indie blonde hair and thick glasses, and was always charming and funny introducing writers. I never talked with him. I usually stood in the back, nursing a watery coke, or with my arms crossed over my chest, clocking everyone in there, all these grad school students, would-be writers like me. They tossed their hair, name dropped, laughed too hard, circulated, networked, took all the good seats. I am not good at hanging out and usually went home right afterwards, moved by the readers, making mental notes about phrases and ideas. Also, always, I seethed, because I wasn’t writing at that level yet, wasn’t on the inside of all these knowing laughs, the various overlapping social circles of the beautiful and brilliant and connected. Friends read at KGB. People I went to school and did workshops with. There was an anthology collecting pieces that had been read at the bar, and then a party for that anthology, and I appeared in or at neither. There was a reading for the release of a literary magazine where I knew the editorial staff, but had not been asked to participate. It’s embarrassing to remember how jealous and alone that place could get me feeling. Reading at KGB was a private goal, a measuring stick that I flogged myself with. It took a decade. After I finally sold my first novel, the publishing house had me read there, months before the book came out, as a way of building hype, validating; for at least a moment: maybe I could really be part of all this.

Binnie Kirshenbaum
When I was in college, my aspiring-writer friends and I often lamented that the bars where the Beats once gathered to read their poetry were long gone (as were most of the Beat poets). Then one of us heard about a bar in the East Village which hosted readings of poetry and prose. Campy in name and décor, KGB was the coolest place I’d ever been to. I frequented it often, always fantasizing that someday I, too, might be at the podium. Fast forward—there I was at the podium reading from my first novel. I still go to KGB readings, and over the years, I have read there a bunch of times, too. Hands down, the iconic KGB Bar is the most fun, un-stuffy place to read and to hear both emerging and established writers read their work. Its place is assured in the canon of the downtown literary world because, like Allen Ginsburg, KGB is genuinely cool, and genuinely cool is forever cool.

Ben Greenman
There’s a Caroline Bird poem called “Dive Bar” that I ran across a few months ago that has a recurring image of red doors. It got me thinking about KGB even before I started thinking about it again today. I have been there so many times over the years, watching friends read, reading my own work, celebrating a publication, mourning a departed author. When I was reading, it was always roughly the same—something that felt like nerves but was really impatience for the moment to come so I could begin, then the reading where I started to sense everyone else’s impatience, then the end, where we all felt relief. Once a million years ago I read a piece that was a kind of comedy bit. You know how authors say “I’m going to read a passage from late in my novel” and then they have to give some background of everything that happened up to then? I thought it would be funny to give an insane Byzantine summary of what had happened up until then and then read a short paragraph of fiction. It was high-concept and I can’t guarantee that it was funny but some people laughed. One did not: a woman I didn’t know who started heckling me right away and would not stop. We didn’t shout at each other but we didn’t not shout, either. That reading was a disaster. I remember another one with Terese Svoboda and Matthew Salesses that was the opposite, a real nice night, a good fit all around. The Caroline Bird poem has red doors and then stairs going down. At KGB they go up. May we all keep going up.

Daphne Beal
When Ken Foster asked me to take over the Sunday night reading series at KGB in 1996, I knew I was being handed the reins to something special, but I definitely didn’t know just how particularly special, in the way you just can’t know that about certain experiences as they are happening. They’re just what you do, and then they become a part of who you are, how you think about the world, and in the case of KGB, how I understood the role of fiction.

One of the main advantages of running the series—aside from interacting so casually with incredible writers who wanted to be there—was that I was guaranteed a spot in the room up front, one that was not crunched up against the bar, squeezed in at a rickety table, or out in the hallway perched at the top of the narrow stairs next to the bathroom. For the two years I ran the series, I sat in the glow of the red neon sign just outside, where not only could I hear the readers, but I had a view of a crowd held rapt by the fiction of George Saunders, Michael Cunningham, A.M. Homes, Jennifer Egan, and on and on.

Pre-cell phones (even cute clamshells), the crowd was quiet and focused at KGB when authors read. Maybe you heard the clink of a Rolling Rock set back on the bar or the scrape of a stool, but otherwise it was responsive laughter, nods, sighs, and affirmative hmmphs to the story being read. People didn’t move; they couldn’t without being the jerk who disrupted the reading.

KGB was hot in the summer and hot in the winter, a kind of ramshackle literary sauna, and if it wasn’t hot, it was because the large, dirty windows were wedged open, which meant icy drafts and competing street noise. The Kraine Theater’s productions downstairs regularly drifted up through the floorboards, and the absence of a mic at the lectern meant the audience leaned in. A collective literary space of elbows, egos, and the occasional ex-boyfriend, KGB was where you went on a Sunday evening in the nineties if you gave a shit about fiction and believed in its power to elucidate, well, everything.

Darin Strauss
Can’t remember how many times I’ve read at KGB, but every time has been great—except for one. Another writer emailed to ask if I might read with him; it was not long after the launch of his new book. I had no fresh work, but said okay. He wanted to go first: No sweat, I told him. Of course. His book was a collection; he opened to his first story—a very long one—and said: “I won’t read the whole thing, obviously.” Then he started. And kept going. And kept going. And kept… Finally, he looked up. “Should I keep reading this until the end?” If there were thirty people in attendance, no more than five clapped. He took that as a green light. On he went, until the very last period of the very last sentence of the very last page. Fifty minutes? Fifty-five minutes? When he was done, I shuffled up to the mic. No more than four minutes, I told myself. And that’s what I did: I read less than a page. And when I was finished, the crowd went nuts. Never had I felt this kind of public gratitude: Yay! It’s short! I never got a standing O before. Many lessons were learned that day. Not least that a KGB crowd will be polite until the bitter end. 

Valerie Stivers
I showed up at KGB in February of 1996, determined to flirt with David Foster Wallace, a full two hours early for the most important reading of my young life. It’s pleasing in retrospect that the event actually was of the historic significance I thought it was, though it’s amazing to me that I ever had the savagery and unselfconsciousness to be that early. My lifelong friend, the writer Alden Jones, accompanied me. Alden was a first-year candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU, and was able to identify the single other person who’d arrived before us—Elizabeth Wurtzel. For years I’ve been under the misapprehension that Wurtzel picked Wallace up that night, but the public record says otherwise. Nonetheless Wurtzel, wearing a clingy white tanktop and no bra in a way I never would have dared, dashed my hopes of catching Wallace’s eye. D. T. Max, in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, writes that Wallace was so nervous before the reading that he tried to turn around on KGB’s legendary creaky staircase. Nonetheless the evening turned out to be a dream few writers will ever experience. Alden and I got a table near the front. Soon it was so packed that pandemonium erupted on the staircase. I don’t remember what Wallace read, but I remember how we loved him, and all throughout the reading the crowd roared on the stairs and in the street.  

Michael Albo
I once read at KGB in the late nineties. I was paired with a writer named Chuck Palahniuk. He might have read from Fight Club, but maybe something he was currently working on at the time, because he told me Fight Club had been optioned for film. Afterwards we had drinks, and I remember he was a little bowled over by its success and how much money he was getting for it. I was confused by him because he was incredibly strapping, tall, handsome, polite—like he was in a fifties musical about loggers—and very kind. “Now that I’ve achieved success I just want to help my friends,” he said to me. He mentioned he was gay and had a husband. I am pretty sure he used the word husband. That’s all I remember us talking about. I don’t remember what I said to him—probably because it was unmemorable—but I remember feeling like he listened to me talk without bringing the conversation back to himself. This doesn’t happen often in NYC. 

Jonathan Lethem
KGB memories: First reading—David Bowman fought to squeeze me into a program at the last minute, to read from Gun, with Occasional Music, on a bill with him and the genius comic novelist Amanda Filipacchi—much to the annoyance of (the then-host) Rebecca Donner, I recall, and probably also Filipacchi, since neither had likely heard of me. Bowman was like that. I was still living in Berkeley and it was only my third-ever reading in New York City, after Limbo and Dixon Place (what a downtown trifecta!). All these decades later I’m pals with Rebecca and Amanda, and Bowman has been dead since 2012. Time, that fucker. Second reading—1998, to a particularly packed house, with Bret Easton Ellis, from the fresh galley of Motherless Brooklyn. Bret read from Glamorama and I was now his “grown-up” colleague—as near as I’ll have to a Bennington graduation commencement. Third reading—in Mark Jacobsen’s nonfiction program—I probably read from “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn”, published in Harper’s—with Budd Schulberg, of On the Waterfront and What Makes Sammy Run? I brought a first edition of The Disenchanted for Schulberg to autograph. Hence a one-degree-of-separation from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thank you, KGB!

Joseph Salvatore
I’ve been fortunate during my years in New York to have read at KGB quite a few times for different publication events and various reading series; but none of those times was more significant to me than the first time. In 1998, editors Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck published a story of mine in their literary journal, Open City. To celebrate that issue’s release, they held a launch party/reading at KGB Bar. That evening, I not only got to read at the Red Room for the first time, but I also got to sit and drink many whiskeys afterward with Mr. Beller and some other writers and magazine staff, talking late into the night. This experience, I felt at the time, meant, in some way, that I had arrived. Before I moved to New York in the mid-nineties, I had a particular image of KGB Bar in my mind, one that I had constructed only from the few photographs I’d seen in magazines on the racks of New England newsstands. To paraphrase Willa Cather in Lucy Gayheart, I carried in my mind a very individual KGB: a photographic blur of smoke and dim red light and tightly packed crowds of blazing, sweaty faces. That evening, my KGB of imagination met the KGB of fact. Standing before the dimly lit, tightly packed room, I discovered what the sting of stagnant cigarette smoke felt like as it hovered at eye-level; I fussed with the fragile podium lamp that seemed merely to suggest the amber glow of candlelight on the page before me; I contended with the elusive microphone whose droop defied multiple manual corrections; the polite pause when the police siren wailed just below the window; the constant sweat-lodge temperature lending crueler symbolism to the color of the walls; and then there was the complicated route through the crowd to the restroom; and the complicated restroom itself; and later the black and white flight of stairs which always seem more vertiginous when you’re leaving with a few drinks in you than when you first arrived. But then there’s that inevitable moment after you’ve given a reading at KGB when the event is over and you’re out on East 4th Street—the last hug given, the last hand shaken—when, standing alone on the sidewalk at last, you look up at the red glow in the window and understand that, despite all the facts, KGB Bar will always hold sway over your imagination, always be that storied place you’ll return to again and again, always be “beautiful,” to quote Cather, “because the rest was blotted out.”