Author readings and book tours are not an essential component of the writing or publishing processes, and so these events have long been associated with a kind of miasmic purposelessness. Go to your basic reading and sit in the back row, where if you squint, you will see above the head of almost everyone involved—the writer(s)/reader(s), the audience, the publicist, the bookseller, the sales clerk(s) who set up the chairs and must wait around to take them down before heading out to an indie-rock show, the local reporter doing a trend piece on the decline of readings—a clump of thought bubbles bumping up against each other like trapped balloons, [...]

Tell me about your job. I write features which are anything that's not hard news—longer form articles that aren't attached to the news cycle. Things that might be more in the cultural ether, maybe profiles of people, or stuff like that. I did a couple fashion stories on the Golden Globes, what people wore, what people wore in the past, I interviewed a bunch of stylists, talked about what it all meant. I've done more interesting things than that, but that's the most recent one. I like writing features, you get the luxury of time, where it's more of a weekly deadline than a daily deadline. In the case [...]

In The Last of the Live Nude Girls, Sheila McClear describes moving to New York City where, adrift and low on cash, she eventually finds work as a stripper in the peep shows. The book, published this month by Soft Skull Press, has been called "eye-opening, gritty and compelling" and "beautiful." She'll be reading at McNally Jackson on Tuesday, August 16.

Matthew Gallaway: I noticed you posted a photograph on your Tumblr of an XXX store in Times Square. Does that mean they're coming back?

Sheila McClear: I don't think they're coming back, just going extinct. I don't even know of any in the [...]

The New York Press went out and asked young people how much money they are making in New York City! Their answers may not surprise you.

Awl pal Sheila McClear, whose memoir The Last of the Live Nude Girls is available now, tells the story of how she came to work in a Times Square peep show.