Screened outside in the parking lot behind The Raconteur! The dark urban world of The Asphalt Jungle is one of the essential destinations in film noir. But be warned: despite tough guy Sterling Hayden’s dreams of bucolic escape, there is no way out. John Huston directed this superbly calibrated crime classic, which displays his usual wry appreciation of fringe-dwellers and down-and-outers. The cast includes Sam Jaffee, indelible as the criminal mastermind, and a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe. Hayden plays the kind of mug he would revisit in Stanley Kurbrick’s The Killing, an informal homage to this film. And the film’s look is definitive: both artful and gritty, it creates a noir landscape that traps its people just as surely as the tar pits traps the dinosaurs. No wonder they call it noir. Thirty folding chairs will be set up in the lot. Feel free to bring you own seat. FREE! With freshly-popped, movie-style popcorn.

concert by Nicola

The workshop examines the six consecutive phases of the writing process: proposal, drafting, self/peer evaluation, revising, editing and finally staging/publication. Students should come prepared to revise/resolve a prior project or to draft a pre-existing idea. The workshop does not, for the most part, assign exercises, but rather use the students' own projects to instruct. Interested parties must select either Tuesday’s evening class OR Thursday’s morning class. Classes conducted by Alex Dawson. 8 - 10 PM, Tues. June 12 – July 3 10 - 12 AM, Thurs. June 14 – July 5 For more information regarding the workshop/instructor, please e-mail raconteurbooks@aol.com. Register now! Seating limited!

The Raconteur Motorcycle Club, which now allows “cagers” (people in cars) to tag along with supplies, meets at the shop and proceeds en masse to a destination of literary significance. NEXT RIDE: The Pearl Buck House. This 1835 farm, set on sixty acres of good earth in Bucks County, is now a museum dedicated to the American author and Nobel Prize winner who lived there for over forty years. The ride is two hours each way. We stop for lunch in the river village of Frenchtown around 1:30 PM.

Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte has generated an eager international readership for his erudite thrillers which include Club Dumas (my favorite novel in the last ten years) and the recent Queen of the South. Alatriste is based on an earlier five-novel sequence (though each title was a phenomenal best-seller in Spain, only the first has been translated and released stateside) featuring swordsman-for-hire Diego Alatriste and set in Spain's quickly tarnishing seventeenth-century Golden Age. Captain Alatriste, a veteran of Spain's Flemish wars, deploys his sword for anyone who will pay, which inevitably leads him into some dicey situations. Featuring Viggo Mortensen (speaking Spanish) as the swashbuckling title character, Alatriste was released abroad in late 2006 to rave reviews and box office success, but has yet to find US distribution. Again, all Raconteur in-store events are FREE! (unless otherwise noted) and include complimentary wine (provided by Silver Decoy, recently selected as the finest winery in NJ). Films are projected onto a 6' X 6' screen with a high end digital projector (courtesy of Leah Kane <a href="www.exhibitAdigital.com">www.exhibitAdigital.com</a>) and piped through the shop's eight built-in, surround sound speakers. <em>Please contact/RSVP Raconteur if you plan to attend. If you know of someone who might be interested in the above event, please forward this notice.</em>