On Saturday, June 18th, at 2:00 p.m., Conjunctions celebrates the release of its spring issue on friendship, Conjunctions:66, Affinity, with a reading by contributors Paul Lisicky and Andrew Ervin at Philadelphia’s Penn Book Center (130 South 34th Street). Copies of the issue will be available for sale and signing. Introduced by novelist and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow, the event is free and open to the public; seating is first-come / first-served. RSVP on Facebook.The literary journal Conjunctions, edited by and published by Bard College, has been a living notebook for provocative, innovative, immaculately crafted fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction since 1981. 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.” In addition to work by Lisicky and Ervin, the Affinity issue includes contributions by Robert Coover, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke, John Ashbery, and many others. Also featured is the first publication of a poem by Robert Duncan.
Independently owned and operated since 1962, Penn Book Center’s thriving reading series has recently featured authors such as Hannah Tennant, Mark Segal, and Rebecca Traister. Follow the bookstore at @PennBookCenter.
ABOUT THE READERS
PAUL LISICKY (@paul_lisicky) is the author of The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy; and the editor of StoryQuarterly. Read his work in Conjunctions’ weekly online magazine, and read and hear his contribution to Conjunctions:61, A Menagerie.“Intelligent and intimate, fierce and tender, real and raw, Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door is an unforgettable memoir about love and loss, friendship and forgiveness. It had me in its thrall from page one.”—Cheryl Strayed
“You know you’re reading an exceptional book when, approximately two sentences into it, you start panicking at the thought of its ending. Be forewarned: this is likely to happen to you, as it did to me, reading the opening pages of The Narrow Door, the achingly gorgeous, wildly ambitious memoir by Paul Lisicky.” —Chicago Tribune
“Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door circumvents the often inscrutable forces that bring us in and out of each other’s lives and hearts, while paying welcome homage to the oft-unsung role of friendship in them. While Lisicky bears witness to ‘the hell of wanting [that] has no cure,’ his ship always feels buoyant, by virtue of a narrator whose attentiveness to feelings both big and small is marked throughout by honesty and devotion.” —Maggie Nelson
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Soho Press brought out Burning Down George Orwell’s House, the debut novel from ANDREW ERVIN (@andrew_ervin), in 2015. Ervin’s short fiction has appeared in periodicals including The Southern Review, Fiction International, Conjunctions:53, Not Even Past, and Conjunctions:56, Terra Incognita.“Burning Down George Orwell’s House is a glorious debut.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“Burning Down George Orwell’s House is a sweet book full of delights. Since many of its best passages are rhapsodies on single malt whiskies, one is tempted to call it a wee bonny dram of a tale.” —New York Times Book Review
“Wry and engaging. Nineteen Eighty-Four casts a long shadow over countless books—but not Burning Down George Orwell’s House. Ervin has achieved something uniquely refreshing: a book that shows the taste and restraint to pay knowing, affectionate and humorous tribute to George Orwell without trying to prove him right—or to create some redundant simulacrum of his work.” —Paste Magazine
“Burning Down George Orwell’s House is an evocative novel of place that makes pointed commentaries about the ‘wired world’ of the twenty-first century that 1984 intuited. As all good comedies do, Ervin’s novel contains a sober question at its core.” —NPR
