News and Events

BROOKLYN, NY—On Wednesday, June 10th, at 7:30 p.m., Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street at South Portland) will celebrate the release of Conjunctions' Spring 2015 issue, Natural Causes, a collection of radical reinventions of the genre of nature writing, with readings by Lucy Ives, Michael Ives, and Wil Weitzel.

This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required, but seating is first come, first served.

Conjunctions publishes innovative writing for adventurous readers. An internationally distributed magazine of provocative, risk-taking fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction, it is published by Bard College and edited by the novelist Bradford Morrow. Work from Conjunctions can frequently be found in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies and in Harper’s. The journal features contemporary masters such as Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Russell Banks, Ann Lauterbach, and Jonathan Lethem; as well as astonishing new voices like Laura van den Berg, Chinelo Okparanta, Julia Elliott, and H. G. Carrillo.

As Karen Russell has said, "Conjunctions is a translation into a multiverse of stories and poems and essays and even weirder hybrid forms, the mutant menagerie of literary fiction. I read it with Christmas pleasure."

The indie bookstore Greenlight is one of Brooklyn's most beloved literary hotspots. Named in the Village Voice's "Best of New York" roundup and called one of the best ten independent bookstores of NYC by the Gothamist, Greenlight's readers for this spring include Joseph O'Neill, Benjamin Percy, and Kelly Link. Among its many projects are the Greenlight Bookstore Radio Hour podcast; the Unbound literary series, in partnership with BAM, which has hosted book launches for authors including John Cleese, Richard Dawkins, Lena Dunham, and Neil Gaiman; the Brooklyn Voices series, in partnership with St. Joseph's College, which has featured Junot Díaz, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Mitchell, and others; and a partnership with Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration that has presented such authors as Hill Harper, Buddha Monk, Bryan Stevenson, and Mike Tyson.

To receive notifications of upcoming Conjunctions readings, book fairs, and other events in the metro area, follow the journal on Facebook and Twitter, or ask to be emailed about NYC events.

ABOUT THE READERS

Writer and Triple Canopy editor LUCY IVES's books include Orange Roses (Ahsahta), an excerpt of which appeared in Conjunctions in print and online; nineties (reissue forthcoming from Little A in June 2015), which BOMB called "alien, canny, and alert … precise … forceful"; and The Worldkillers (SplitLevel), about which Noah Eli Gordon wrote, "Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out."

A jazz musician, an innovator in the field of text in performance, and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Lillian Fairchild Award, MICHAEL IVES is also the founding member and composer of the sound/text performance trio F’loom and the author of Wavetable (Dr. Cicero Books) and The External Combustion Engine (Futurepoem). As John Ashbery says: “Michael Ives’s cunningly quarried prose plinths are stippled with the comedy and cruelty of Marcel Duchamp’s and Raymond Roussel’s wildest inventions. Move over, machines célibataires—The External Combustion Engine has arrived, and it’s hummin’!“ Ives’s work can be found in Open Letters Monthly, Seneca Review, and elsewhere.

One of today's most exciting emerging voices in fiction, WIL WEITZEL has published work in Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He has received the Center for Fiction's NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship and the Washington Square Review Flash Fiction Award. Weitzel is currently working on a novel taking place in the Hindu Kush Range of northern Pakistan.