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Conjunctions:66, Affinity reading by Robert Coover, Elizabeth Gaffney & Stephen O’Connor
NYU Bookstore celebrates the release of the friendship issue of Conjunctions
Thursday, June 30, 2016
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
726 Broadway, NYC
On Thursday, June 30th, at 6:00 p.m., Conjunctions celebrates the release of its spring issue on friendship, Conjunctions:66, Affinity, with a reading by contributors Robert Coover, Elizabeth Gaffney, and Stephen O’Connor at the NYU Bookstore (726 Broadway between Waverly and Washington). Copies of the issue will be available for sale and signing. The event is free and open to the public; seating is first-come / first-served.

The literary journal Conjunctions, edited by novelist Bradford Morrow and published by Bard College, has been a living notebook for provocative, risk-taking, immaculately crafted fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction since 1981. As PEN American Center has it: “Conjunctions is one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines: innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful.” In addition to work by Coover, Gaffney, and O’Connor, the Affinity issue includes contributions by Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Lisicky, Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke, John Ashbery, and many others. Also featured is the first publication of a poem by Robert Duncan.

ABOUT THE READERS

The canonical metafictionalist ROBERT COOVER’s many books include The Origin of the Brunists, Pricksongs & Descants, The Public Burning, Gerald’s Party, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Noir, and The Brunist Day of Wrath. At Brown University, Coover established the International Writers Project, a program that provides an annual fellowship and safe haven to endangered international writers who face harassment, imprisonment, and suppression of their work in their home countries. He launched the world's first hypertext fiction workshop in 1990–91, cofounded the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999, and created CaveWriting, the first writing workshop in immersive virtual reality, in 2002. 

Praise for Robert Coover:

“Coover is still a brilliant mythmaker, a potty-mouthed Svengali, and an evil technician of metaphors. He is among our language’s most important inventors.” —Ben Marcus

“Of all the postmodern writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious, mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls, and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it.” —Michiko Kakutani

“Robert Coover is one of our masters now. The tumultuous, Babylonian exuberance of his mind is fueled and directed by his equally passionate craftsmanship. He seems to be able to do anything.” —New York Times Book Review
 
***
 
ELIZABETH GAFFNEY (@elizgaffney) is the author of the novels When the World Was Young and Metropolis.  She lives in Brooklyn.
 
Praise for When the World Was Young:
 
“Elizabeth Gaffney’s wonderful, richly imagined novel When the World Was Young cheers the power and resilience of a society-bucking young woman.” —Vanity Fair
 
“A smart, sensitive historical novel driven by fast-paced storytelling.” —O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Devastating and compelling.” —Elle
 
***

STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author of five books, including the brand-new novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings and the fiction collection Here Comes Another Lesson.
 
Praise for Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings:
 
“By turns delicate and luminous, then searing and straightforward, Stephen O’Connor’s novel sings—it is an epic dream and an epic read.  Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come alive in this book, beautifully imagined, and so well-rendered that they become achingly human.” —Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones

“A brilliant, huge-hearted act of the moral imagination. O'Connor has written a kind of quantum historical novel—simultaneously fiction and nonfiction, wave and particle. With dreamlike fluidity, the story moves from the real halls of Monticello to Jefferson's musings in the afterlife, from meditations on the phenomenology of color to what the theft of dignity means. This book creates new facts to live by; it's stranger and braver than I know how to describe. Open to any page and you will see what I mean.” —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

Contact: Micaela Morrissette, [email protected], 845-758-7054
http://www.conjunctions.com

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In Print

Vol. 79
Onword
Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

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March 22, 2023
To survive sadly is still. 
At a boat’s bottom, allegedly a boat. 
Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. 
Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. 
The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. 
Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus. 

Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. 
No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. 
No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam. 

We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
March 15, 2023
He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit. 
March 8, 2023
When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.