NYC, Ep. 44

November 6, 2013 — After two talent-blazing Brooklyn events, Literary Death Match returned to its birthplace — the Lower East Side — for a Cake Shop spectacular that saw Ashley Cardiff outlast co-finalist Jenny Zhang in a hotly-contested edition of Literary Spelling Bee II, as Cardiff won it all by a single point, securing her the Literary Death Match NYC crown. 

But before the finale was even a consideration, the night kicked off with Brendan Jay Sullivan reading "a total panty-dropper" of an excerpt from his book Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives, which featured a girl having a nervous breakdown while everyone thought she was just being awful. Next up was Ashley Cardiff, who read from her book Night Terrors, a haunting excerpt about the most unimaginable thing she'd seen in Manhattan (a man sucking on a dead bird's butt — eww!). 

The mic was then handed over to the quadtet of all-star judges: Ophira Eisenberg, comedian, host of NPR's Ask Me Another, author of Screw Everyone and the first woman to judge all three categories for LDM; Nathaniel Adams, Against Nature manager, author of I Am Dandy: Return of the Elegant Gentleman; and Micah Sherman, actor, comedian, and the mind behind the documentary "Like Me". The trio reeled off an array of apt and wild commentary before making the night's first impossible decision, naming Cardiff as the night's first finalist. 

After a boozy intermission, Round 2 kicked off with Jenny Zhang (poet and author of Dear Jenny, We Are All Find) who reeled off a lovely love poem from memory. Finally, it was Reif Larsen, author of the best-selling The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (soon: a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet), who spun off a mesmerizing tale rife with verbal pyrotechnics that was cut from his new novel. 

Again the judges were center stage, with Eisenberg loving Zhang holding her tiny purse all through the reading, and after a long deliberation, they emerged with a split decision, deciding it would be Zhang who would advance as the night's second finalist.

Then host and LDM creator Adrian Todd Zuniga stepped up to announce the night's finale: Literary Spelling Bee II, in which Cardiff and Zhang were tasked with spelling complicated author names. The two were unfazed on repeat, with neither missing nary a letter until the night's final round, in which Zhang stumbled, and Cardiff's brilliant-haired Phone-A-Friend came up to nail every letter in the 1996 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, to win Cardiff the LDM NYC, Ep. 44 medal, and literary immortality to go with it. 

Follow LDM on Twitter and/or Facebook now!