(Mr. Stein is also devoted to Otto, Mario Batali’s casual Italian restaurant, where the kitchen stays open until midnight. “The bartender, Frank, is a devotee of English book reviews like the L.R.B. and the T.L.S.,” Mr. Stein said. “One evening, just chatting with others at the bar, I assigned a piece for our blog, learned of a possible office space for the Review, and arranged a job interview with someone who wanted to sell ads for us.”)

I polished off the last of my burger, and fled into the night.

Anyone who doubts that words alone can still pull a rowdy crowd in Manhattan has not recently visited the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side. If the vogue for poetry slams has dimmed somewhat in America, no one here got the memo. I arrived early for an open-mike poetry competition, and the line outside stretched nearly a full city block. It was cold and windy out there, too.

Inside, it was warm and jubilant. Cheap bottles of beer were to be had. The night’s M.C. warmed up the crowd by announcing: “This is not Dead Men Watching. If something moves you here, respond.” She told the judges, plucked from the audience, to rate the performers on a scale from 0 to 10. “Zero is Rush Limbaugh,” she said. “Ten is Michelle Obama.” I so wish I could employ this scale for book reviews.

A few blocks away, at KGB Bar — a dark, intimate, Soviet-themed second-story space, where one half expects to see Mata Hari drinking shots of Stoli — the cult novelist Kris Saknussemm was declaiming bits of his new autobiographical book, “Sea Monkeys” (Soft Skull Press), while a friend tossed off angular riffs behind him on a harmonica. KGB Bar has a regular reading series and is always worth a drop-in. This night was no exception. The crowd was small but rapt. Mr. Saknussemm soloed like a jazz master.

I strode across town to Kettle of Fish, a venerable bar on Christopher Street in the West Village, for a pint. By now, I’d had several. This is a Green Bay Packers bar (go figure) with a low ceiling, strung lights, a homey vibe and a bookish reputation. It’s the only place I saw someone drinking while actually working on a manuscript. I might have struck up a conversation, but he seemed manic and tweaked. Perhaps he was editing E. L. James’s next book. Best to leave him alone.

I ended my night at Lolita, on Broome Street in SoHo, recommended to me by friends. It’s a languid, sprawling space, with an excellent pink cursive neon sign in front, where most of the women looked like extras from an episode of Lena Dunham’s HBO series, “Girls.” I would report to you the books they were carrying, but the only readers in the bunch were grasping Kindles. When it’s no longer possible to tell what attractive young women are reading, part of the romance of Manhattan is gone. It’s time to move to Sheboygan and open a deli.

Back at the Algonquin, my head spinning only slightly, I hung the hotel’s version of a Do Not Disturb sign outside my door. It read: “Quiet Please. Writing the Great American Novel.” This is an amusing tchotchke, worth taking home to put in your weird uncle’s Christmas stocking, despite the flagrant unlikelihood of anyone writing any kind of novel whatsoever with that sign hanging on his or her door.