Vermin on the Mount — Nolan Knight

“Friday in Highland Park. The irreverent monthly reading series Jim…”

Literary readings are usually an endurance test wearing the costume of an evening out. Somebody reads too long in a voice they do not use in real life, everyone claps politely, and half the room checks the time. Jim Ruland started Vermin on the Mount in 2004 on the opposite premise: the writer is allowed to be funny and the audience is allowed to drink. That irreverence is the entire reason it has survived on its own irregular schedule for two decades while more respectable series folded quietly. It runs now at Book Show in Highland Park, and this installment features Nolan Knight reading in the evening. The audience is the LA writing world compressed into one room, the MFA crowd, the small-press crowd, the literary-magazine crowd, plus the people who have been turning up since the original venue on Mount Washington. Five-dollar suggested donation, books for sale at the back. Bring the friend with a finished manuscript who has never once read from it out loud.