The Return of Nerd Jeopardy

A.k.a. Nerd Jeopardy VII: A New Frontier.

Next week I’m hosting everyone’s favorite literary trivia night, this time with more wine, worse prizes, and incredibly humiliating audience participation. (Also incredibly rewarding audience participation.) Watch for a surprise guest appearance. Or two.

FSG’s Work in Progress & Small Demons present Nerd Jeopardy
Tuesday, April 17th, 7pm
McNally Jackson
54 Prince St. NYC 

And don’t worry, I won’t be as harsh as this guy:

Nerd Jeopardy Success!

I believe everyone had a damn fine time on Wednesday. Team #nerdalert took first, winning the Paris Review Interviews box set, the limited slipcase edition of Skippy Dies, and the Oxford Companion to Beer. And some lucky gentleman nabbed the Audience Prize ($100 to McNally Jackson) by correctly guessing the order of Proust’s seven-volume  À la recherche du temps perdu. On the first try. In French.

Photo by Electric Literature's Ryan Chang

Thanks to The Millions and Electric Literature for their very complimentary recaps. The next Nerd Jeopardy? April 17th, McNally Jackson. Mark your calendars.

Nerd Jeopardy Returns for 2012

We’re bringing our night of wine and literary trivia to McNally Jackson on Wednesday, Jan. 18th. Three teams will compete for glory and modest prizes; everyone will compete for loudest and wittiest heckle.

To whet your appetite for all things bookish and Trebekian, here’s a look at our last Nerd Jeopardy from November:

My Favorite Books of 2011

December is the best and worst month to recap my year in reading. On the one hand, I can simply scroll through my Goodreads reviews to pick out favorites. On the other hand, I usually discover several books from perusing Best Of lists elsewhere; I’ll end up reading great 2011 novels in the first months of 2012, rending the titles below provisional at best.

So read the following with a grain of salt. (This is a cross-post with Work in Progress, where 22 editors and authors listed their favorite 2011 reads as well.)

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

The Road to Somewhere by James Reeves

The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Suicide by Édouard Levé

Nerd Jeopardy Success!

It was a thoroughly Trebekian night in Soho, with a packed house and lots (and lots) of wine. (Thanks Moët Hennessy!) Round one featured a surprise guest appearance by Colson Whitehead, and Emma Straub, our intrepid field correspondent, reported from California in her round two Video Daily Double.

The Categories for Round One

Thanks Michele Filgate and everyone at McNally Jackson, too! It was a smashing success, and it was great to see so many friends in the audience. And of course, congrats to [we have no name], the winning team. (The MVP award goes to Toby.) Ladies Who Brunch and We Just Came for the Wine performed admirably as well.

From "Fighting Words"

My favorite moment in the night was during Final Jeopardy, when the entire room yelled out “William Carlos Williams!” How often do you hear a hundred people cheerily yelling out a poet’s name in a bookstore? (Probably not as often as we’d like, but still.)

Will there be another one? Certainly. Nerd Jeopardy will return for the Lit Crawl later this summer and again at McNally Jackson in November. As always, Work in Progress subscribers will be the first to know.