Friday March 30th, 7 pm
MANDY KEIFETZ LAUNCHES Flea Circus: a brief bestiary of grief
About Flea Circus: Fiction. Pascal's Wager and performing fleas. The Haunted Mansion of Long Branch and an old dockside bar. Raceway Park and a pristine 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. A cat named Altamont. These are all that stand between a young mathematician and madness as she attempts to make sense of her lover's suicide. Narrow margins, you say? Not much to place between a slip of a broken-hearted Jersey Girl and the Abyss? Indeed, it is a treacherous twelve seconds on the quarter mile, hilarious and harrowing by turn. Blink and you'll miss it.
"Flea Circus is a remarkable book. This is a fearless, deeply moving, and wholly original work, finely written and exquisitely devastating. Mandy Keifetz is a writer of unusual talent and depth." --Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Singer's Gun
"A tour de force."--Kirkus Reviews
Mandy Keifetz is a 4th-generation New Yorker. Her work has appeared in .Cent, Penthouse, Vogue, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other 'zines too numerous to count. She was a Fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002 and her plays have been staged in New York, London, Cambridge, Montreal, and Oslo. She lives in Brooklyn with an opera composer, their child, and an epileptic hound dog.
Saturday March 31st, 7 pm
CONCEPTUAL WRITING
ROUND TABLE AND Q + A WITH NEW YORK POETS
ROB FITTERMAN, KIM ROSENFIELD
MODERATOR: GAIL SCOTT
Why is Conceptual Writing the emergent 21st century literary current? What's at stake in writing that insists on "unoriginality, plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, file-sharing" (description of an "uncreative writing" workshop given on Michelle Obama's invitation at the White House. Fitterman and Rosenfield will talk and answer questions culled from students at Université de Montréal, Concordia, McGill.
Kim Rosenfield is
a poet and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapist. She is the author of
five books of poetry. Her latest book, Lividity, is forthcoming from Les Figues
Press in 2012. USO (I’ll Be Seeing You) will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse
in 2013.
Robert Fitterman's boyhood street in Creve Coeur, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, is still flanked by a Shell gas station on one side and a Mobil station on the other. His writing involves identity issues complicated by the web. His 12 books include Holocaust Museum (Veer Books, 2011) and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Vanessa Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).
Oh hey, and if you like Gail Scott, come out tomorrow night too!
