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  CONJUNCTIONS CELEBRATES THE FALL ISSUE WITH A FREE READING AT BOOKCOURT

Karen Russell, Paul La Farge, Stephen O’Connor, and John Madera Read from Their Stories in Conjunctions:55, Urban Arias, with emcee Brian Evenson

Friday, December 3, 7 p.m., 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, New York

 BROOKLYN, NY—On Friday, December 3, at 7 p.m., the literary journal Conjunctions will celebrate the release of its Fall 2010 issue with a special reading at BookCourt, 163 Court Street. Paul La Farge (The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, The Facts of Winter), John Madera (Big Other, Chapbook Review), Stephen O’Connor (Rescue, Here Comes Another Lesson), and Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Swamplandia!) will read from their stories in Conjunctions:55, Urban Arias.
     That special issue of the trail-blazing magazine features narratives of the city and investigates one of the oldest experiments in human habitation. Other contributors include Etgar Keret, Lyn Hejinian, C.D. Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, John Ashbery, David Ohle, Thomas Bernhard—and many more. Emceed by the award-winning Brian Evenson (a Conjunctions senior editor and Urban Arias contributor), this event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.
      Edited by Bradford Morrow and published by Bard College, Conjunctions (www.conjunctions.com) is a biannual journal of new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, interviews, and translation. Since the first issue appeared in 1981, it has been distinguished by its special anthology-length format—each issue can deliver up to 400 pages of never-before-published, innovative, and fully realized work. The magazine’s special design allows it to explore the length and depth of the theme at hand, whether that’s urban life, doppelgängers and evil twins, children’s secrets, the cinema of literature, the novella, imaginary realism, death, or desire. In addition to the print component, the online edition, Web Conjunctions, publishes new writing, free for all, on a weekly basis
      The New York Times Book Review has said, “Conjunctions is striking … a rich collection which balances well-known writers with exciting new ones,” and The Washington Post has written, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”
      BookCourt has become one of Brooklyn’s defining literary spaces—New York Magazine calls it “ripe with character and personality.” Its frequent reading series brings a wide variety of prominent and local authors, including, in Fall–Winter 2010, Alex Ross, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Franzen.
      For more information on the readers, click the links above or simply scroll down this page. For more information about this event or the magazine, contact Micaela Morrissette, Conjunctions Managing Editor, at conjunctions@bard.edu.






PARTICIPANT BIOS

  International Horror Guild Award-winner and Edgar nominee Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, including two of Time Out New York’s top books of 2009: Last Days (Underland Press), winner of the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel; and the story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press), a World Fantasy Award finalist. Jonathan Lethem has said, “Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”
      A previous novel, The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2008), was also a Time Out New York Best Book, and was an Edgar and IHG finalist. Andrew Ervin wrote in The Believer, “The final fifty pages of Brian Evenson’s new novel, The Open Curtain, contain some of the most stunning and virtuosic fiction I have ever read. Seriously.” The Washington Post called it, ““[A] shocking novel of murder and madness … [that] produces scintillating sparks … As the action progresses, Evenson compellingly spells out what it means to be a truly lost soul.”
      The Wavering Knife (Fiction Collective 2, 2004), a short-story collection, prompted George Saunders to write, “There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson”; and Samuel R. Delaney to note that, “like Poe’s, Evenson’s stories range from horror to humor; a similar high critical intelligence is always in control. We read them with care, with our guard up, only to find they have already slipped inside and gotten to work, refining the feelings, the vision, the life.”
      Evenson’s first collection, Altmann’s Tongue, the source of much controversy at Brigham Young University, where he was then teaching, was described by Gilles Deleuze as “powerful, by reason of the mode of the language and the unusual style, by reason of the violence and the force of the words … I admire this book.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction described the book’s display of “Evenson’s myriad skills. The stories range from rural tales of death to a retelling of the biblical Job story, in which a skeletonized Job trades barbs and blows with a murderous lumberjack … There is a detached brutality to the collection, similar to Beckett’s novels, which, due to Evenson’s precise control over language is both disturbing and compelling.”
      Evenson’s work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He himself has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

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  Paul LaFarge, winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, has published three novels: The Artist of the Missing (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001) and The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005).
      The Artist of the Missing, winner of the California Book Award, explores an anonymous, modern-day city in which people go missing on a regular basis. Booklist described the shape of the book as “allegorical stories [interspersed] with beautiful woodcut illustrations,” surreal in style, by cubist artist Stephen Alcorn. The New York Times pointed to the book’s “elan and imaginative audacity, not to mention [its] fine disdain for the confines of realism.”
      Haussmann investigates the mysterious private life of Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who, in the 1860s, masterminded the mid-nineteenth-century reinvention of the Parisian street system, creating new boulevards such as the Champs-Élysées. Writing for The New York Times, which named Haussmann one of its notable books, Edmund White called it an “imaginative—indeed, a hallucinatory—approach, one that ends up by transforming his supremely practical subject (for Haussmann was above all a systematic worker) into an elegant and sometimes grotesque fairy-tale hero.” Publishers Weekly raved about La Farge’s “tremendous novel, which is every bit as grand, gracious and sophisticated as Paris itself … [and] as much an enlightening history of Paris as it is a tragic, affecting love story. An astonishing amount of research, a believable tone, and a captivating story all come together to make this work a stunning success.”
      The Facts of Winter, presented as La Farge’s translation of “author” Paul Poissel, is “a wispy reverie [that] performs sly thievery, nicking childlike flights of fancy lost to the magical realm between memory and imagination” (Village Voice). The novel takes the form of a collection of dreams that occur in and around Paris in the year 1881.

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  Fiction writer, editor, reviewer, and interviewer John Madera has published work in Opium, elimae, Bookslut, The Collagist, Tarpaulin Sky, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Brooklyn Rail, and in many other venues. Madera is the managing editor of Big Other, about which Time Out New York insisted, “Obsessive readers, go directly to John Madera’s website.” He is also an editor for The Chapbook Review, senior flash fiction editor at jmww, and monthly columnist for The Nervous Breakdown. In 2010, Publishing Genius will put out a collection of essays on the craft writing edited by Madera.

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  Stephen O’Connor has published two works of fiction, Rescue (Harmony, 1989) and Here Comes Another Lesson (Free Press, 2010), and two nonfiction books, Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (Simon & Schuster), a Kappa Delta Pi Book of the Year; and Orphan Trains (Houghton Mifflin), honored by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
      Published this year, Here Comes Another Lesson has been lauded by Kirkus for its “style, which can be as controlled and elegant as John Updike’s but which serves a very different purpose,” and by Oscar Hijuelos for its “true mastery of the form; along the way, Mr. O’Connor, in his passion for language and storytelling, not only forms a bond between the reader and himself, but leaves one with a feeling of gratitude—and yes, perhaps, even an affection—for his gifts.” Time Out New York said, “Highly praised and hotly anticipated … [this] deeply inventive collection of stories … examine[s] the limitations of modern humanity and morality … [and gives] us a portrait of human life and all its harrowing peculiarities that’s equal parts funny, strange, and poignant”; while Publishers Weekly approved the author’s “skewed, knowing hand … [and] droll, slightly disorienting account,” adding: “O’Connor is a wizard at engendering sympathy for his characters.”
      O’Connor’s fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He has received Columbia University, American Antiquarian Society, and MacDowell Fellowships, and teaches in the writing MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence.

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  Karen Russell has been featured in both The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and New York Magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award, and in 2007 was one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Her fiction has also appeared in Oxford American and Zoetrope.
      Her forthcoming novel, Swamplandia!, follows a short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (both Knopf, 2006 and 2011), which was honored by the National Book Foundation and described by Booklist as an “unusual, haunting collection [that] confirms that the hype is well deserved … Russell’s characters are caught between overlapping worlds—living and dead, primal and civilized, animal and human—and the adolescent narrators are neither children nor adults. Even the settings, the murky swamps and coasts of the Florida Everglades, reinforce the sense of wild impermanence … Original and astonishing, joyful and unsettling, these are stories that will stay with readers.”
      The hype to which Booklist referred was reflected in part in The Guardian, which praised Russell’s “explosively imaginative stories [in] an adolescent hinterland … Full of a lively sense of the fantastical, the stories also inhabit a beautifully realised natural environment of starlit skies, phosphorescent caves, and abundant animal life … Russell’s injection of a sense of the absurd lends an originality and lightness of touch to this creatively acrobatic debut.” Nor could The Believer get enough of St. Lucy’s “unnerving, darkly funny, and immensely enjoyable [stories],” calling it “one of the strongest debuts in recent memory.”

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