Damion Searls—a writer who likes to pass the time by translating Rilke, Proust and Walser, among others (what fun!)—and travels in the Keith Gessen n+1 orbit, has an excellent short-story collection out next week titled What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going. In these five stories (thankfully a far quicker read than Remembrance of Things Past), Searls introduces us to a series of disaffected writerly types just trying to get by. He is quick to acknowledge his debt to the old guard (each story is connected somehow to an earlier work by Gide, Hawthorne, Inoue, Nabokov and Landolfi, respectively), but it’s his Hawthorne riff, “The Cubicles,” a play off the Scarlet Letter author’s short “The Custom-House,” that will work nicest in tandem with Personal Days author Ed Park, whom he reads with tonight at Book Culture. Who knew that office culture would be such a great setting for fiction? Friday Searls will appear with Benjamin Kunkel at BookCourt.