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From Stephen Elliott
Monday 05/20:
The Belladonna* Collective’s Hot Texts series continues with readings from Lauren Hunter, Samantha Zighelboim, Allison Power, and Christine Kanownik. The Way Station, 6:30pm, $5 suggested donation.
The Poetry Project hosts Ross Gay and Lauren Shufran. St. Mark’s Church, 8pm, free.
...moreThe new media landscape might tear writing as we know it apart—or it might give us opportunities to find thrilling new niches.
Tomorrow night in NYC, join writers and editors from Columbia University, Tin House, and more to hear how they’ve “carved out a new media approach to old school storytelling,” and how you, too, can “find your niche.”
See their Facebook event page for more details.
...moreMonday 05/13:
Emily Books presents “What is the Queer Novel?” featuring a reading and discussion with Sarah Schulman and Barbara Browning. Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm, free.
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes a killer line-up featuring The Rumpus’ Roxane Gay, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, Leigh Newman, and Michael Heald.
...moreMonday 04/29:
The PEN World Voices Festival is celebrating its ninth year and kicks off tonight with a reading titled Bravery. Hosted by comedian and author Baratunde Thurston, the reading will feature readings from “Najwan Darwish, ‘one of the 39 best Arab writers under the age of 40′; Joy Harjo, a formidable voice in the second wave of ‘Native American Renaissance’; Mikhail Shishkin, one of the best contemporary Russian writers; award-winning Caribbean writers Jamaica Kincaid and Earl Lovelace; 2012 German Book Prize winner Ursula Krechel; Air Force Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S.
While many readers are familiar with the melancholy persona he’s adopted—and despite having written a new novel about a life falling apart—author Dan Kennedy is finally ready to admit something to the lit crowd, here and now: he loves mainstream American comedy…
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Master storyteller and Moth regular Peter Aguero talks about family dysfunction, fighting with hammers, and how not to bomb onstage.
...moreOne of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another.
Humans don’t have to be taught:
...moreWe see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch a movie or read a book….We are constantly cataloguing the story lines around us in an effort to sort out our own.
Tomorrow is Fireside’s monthly storytelling event at The Jellyfish Gallery in SOMA.
The lineup includes Rumpus interviewee Joe Loya, NPR’s Doug Cordell, and former San Francisco mayoral candidate Chicken John. The theme is IN HOT PERSUIT/ THE GREAT ESCAPE, which is “intentionally broad, so we could be hearing stories about car chases, breaking up with that ‘special’ someone, or somewhere in between.”
Tickets are $10 and the show starts at 8pm.
...moreSinger/Songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, a folk opera set in a post-Apocalyptic Depression-Era, illuminates the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus through the twangs and harmonies of folk music. If that seems like a disjointed mix of influences, listen to Hadestown and you’re likely to be convinced that Mitchell’s ambitious project holds all of its thematic strains together with plenty of gorgeous songwriting and bluesy angst.
...moreBack in 1999, when I was a freshman in college, a friend of mine told me about a new movie he’d just downloaded on his computer that featured a bunch of students, armed with video cameras, who’d been hunted down by a killer in a forest back east.
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