Live! From City Lights

 

On Tuesday, January 31, 2012, Ben Marcus stopped by City Lights to read from his acclaimed new novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf).

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.

With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.

The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction, Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, Time, Conjunctions, Grand Street, and Tin House. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. Marcus is a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2008 he received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. Marcus is an associate professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

 

On Tuesday, January 24, 2012, Charlie Newton stopped by City Lights bookstore to discuss his novel, Start Shooting and “Beat-Noir” as a form of literary alchemy — burning away at the veneer of consumer culture and impacting America’s inner life just like the Beats did in the 1950s.

about Charlie Newton’s Start Shooting

Officer Bobby Vargas and actress/waitress Arleen Brennan understand hopes-and-dreams, the bet-it-all kind that either propel you through the fire or burn you to death. At age thirteen a gruesome rape/murder rocked their lives and the unforgiving streets of Chicago’s Four Corners. Now, twenty-nine years later, a dying Chicago newspaper plans a serial exposé on that “solved” case, threatening to implicate Bobby and his older brother, Ruben—a decorated detective, patron del barrio. The “exposé” will lead Arleen and the Vargas brothers down an increasingly twisted and terrifying path, where the sins of the past threaten to destroy what remains of the truth.

As readers and critics discovered in his first novel, Calumet City, Charlie Newton’s Chicago is a landscape as brutal and poignant as any in modern crime fiction—a multi-faceted, shockingly violent labyrinth of gangland politics, political backstabbing, corporate malfeasance, and, possibly, hope.

Newton was joined by author of City of Secrets Kelli Stanley.

City of Secrets is a powerful, heart-pounding sequel to Kelli Stanley’s scorching thriller and first-in-series City of Dragons, which introduced her unique and unforgettable series heroine, Miranda Corbie. Stanley writes 1940 without gloves on, without censorship, evoking the beauty of Benny Goodman swing and the brutality of a synagogue stained by a swastika. Against the backdrop of a Europe defeated by Nazi Germany, the world on the brink of total war, and an America unsure of where to turn, Miranda Corbie fights on, a lost soldier … but never a lost soul.

Charlie Newton (photo courtesy of Lisa Law)

Charlie Newton‘s first novel, Calumet City, was a finalist for the Edgar, International Thriller Writers, and Macavity awards, among others. Start Shooting is his second novel.

Kelli Stanley is the author of a critically acclaimed Roman Noir series. The first book in that series, Nox Dormienda, won the Bruce Alexander Award for best historical mystery. The second, The Curse-Maker, was also published by Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books. The first book in the Miranda Corbie series, City of Dragons, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also named one of the 2010 Top Ten Mystery Thrillers by Oline Cogdill and one of the Top Ten Best Fiction by Bay Area Authors by the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, Jarett Kobek stopped by City Lights to celebrate the release of ATTA (Semiotext(e)). Katrina Palmer joined via Skype.

ATTA is a psychedelic biography of lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Presented with a series of videos and images, Kobek discussed the nature of his project, the research methodology employed, existential inquiries into terrorism, the collusion of tyranny and the literary arts, and why Norman Mailer has a bad rap.

Artist and novelist Katrina Palmer appeared live via Skype from London. Palmer read from ATTA and her own book The Dark Object.

more about ATTA:
Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, “rogue states,” jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.

In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master’s thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the “Islamic-Oriental city.” Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek’s novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history’s great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, “The Whitman of Tikrit”–a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein’s last day before capture–ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

Praise for ATTA:

“This is an unsettling book on several levels… Ultimately not a book to be received and accepted; it is a text requiring its readers to wrestle with its content and more forward into the questions it leaves open…” – Spencer Dew, Rain Taxi

“Kobek’s method of layering those things we hold most sacred with those we abhor, creates an healthfully unsettling mental texture.” – John Cotter, Open Letters Monthly

“Highly absorbing… some of this works well…” – Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement

Jarett Kobek is an internationally published writer living in California. His Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction has been anthologized alongside Haruki Murakami and F. X. Toole. His first novel was commissioned and published by Book Works of London as part of the experimental literature Semina series. visit http://kobek.com/

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer who lives in London. Her first book, The Dark Object, was published by Book Works in 2010. 2011 work includes: live performances at Again, A Time Machine Motto, Berlin and at These Silences Edinburgh Festival; mmmm a CD for Art House Foundation, London; Relief a short story in the Modern British Sculpture catalogue, Royal Academy, London.

 

On Thursday, January 12, 2012, Guillermo Gómez-Peña stopped by City Lights Bookstore for an evening of performative pedagogy in celebration of his most recent publication Conversations Across Borders (Seagull Press). A long time City Lights author, Gómez-Peña was joined by City Lights Executive Director Elaine Katzenberger, as well as Canadian theorist and editor of Gomez-Peña’s recent book, Laura Levin.

For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

Conversations Across Borders was published by my padrino Richard Schechner and edited by Canadian theorist Laura Levin. It contains an anthology of very bold (and performative) conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with rebel curators, pioneering artists, cultural anthropologists, art historians, activist writers—in essence a wide variety of intelligent, engaged and fierce contemporary art practitioners and theorists. It also contains gorgeously provocative never before published photos. My Canadian sister Laura Levin and the amazing team of Seagull books made sure that the book functions both as an accessible (and activist) treatise on theory as well as a beautiful art/ifact.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto. She is the editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press) as well as a number of collections on performance, art and public space (in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Performance Research). She is Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. A director, dramaturg and performance deviser, she recently has collaborated on several transnational performance projects that investigate the intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies,

Elaine Katzenberger is the Executive Director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, an editor, and past friend and collaborator with Pocha Nostra.