Launch Party for Joe Halstead's West Virginia Friday 2/3, 7:30pm

Join us for a reading and launch party to celebrate the release of Joe Halstead's new book, West Virginia.

About the Book:

When Jamie Paddock learns of his father's suicide, memories of his childhood in West Virginia come roaring back. Jaime lives in New York City, developing marketing videos for YouTube, struggling to write and partying a lot — all while suppressing the accent that gives him away. But now, Jamie has to go home, to stay with his disabled mother and sister in their trailer (conveniently located between two Walmarts). Always poorer than the local coal miners, Jamie's family relies on welfare, scraping by from meal to meal, prescription to prescription. Nothing much has changed, except for Jamie, and the fact that his father’s corpse has yet to be recovered. This may be the reason there are no funeral plans, but the unanswered questions surrounding his father’s death pull Jamie further into his past, even as his adopted city lures him back.

In West Virginia, Joe Halstead writes with honesty and compassion about the state he grew up in, and returned to, in this debut novel about one young man's search for answers and personal reckoning. West Virginia is an unflinching portrait of the people of Appalachia and life in a difficult, beautiful, and often misunderstood place. Author Bud Smith said, "Joe Halstead's West Virginia is devastating and thrilling."

About the Author:

Joe Halstead divides his time between Beckley, West Virginia and Lexington, KY. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Five Quarterly, People Holding, Cheat River Review, Sundog Lit, The Stockholm Review, Sheepshead Review, and others. West Virginia is his first novel.

Atlas Obscura Presents: Changes of Power 1991, Jan. 19th, 7:30pm

Come to the bookstore on Thursday, January 19th at 7:30pm for the third in a series of talks brought to you by Atlas Obscura on the hidden history and untold contemporary realities of Russian culture and politics. Explore the complex history and insider stories of the change of power between Mikhael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in December of 1991. 

For more information on the event, visit the facebook event page or website. 

Resist! Book Club: Conflict is not Abuse January 18, 6:30pm

Join us at Unnameable for our first meeting of the Resist! Book Club, a monthly meeting where we will discuss books (critical, fictional, etc) with a focus on radical resistance, historical and contemporary activism, and intersectionality. For our first installment, we will be talking about Conflict is not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. Pick up a copy at Unnameable! 

Come with questions, disagreements, thoughts, passages to discuss, excitement, etc. 

More About Conflict Is Not Abuse:
Novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer Sarah Schulman’s latest book is a timely and searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, revealing how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the “other” to avoid facing themselves. She illustrates how Supremacy behaviour and Traumatized behaviour resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

SARAH SCHULMAN is the author of seventeen previous books, including the novels The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Empathy, and the non-fiction books The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. Her latest book is Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Her many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (Playwriting), a Fulbright Fellowship (Judaic Studies), and the Kessler Award for Lifetime Contribution to LGBT Studies. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York College of Staten Island.

Red Bloom Reading Group: Marxist Feminism, What is Patriarchy? Jan 15, 2pm

Join us at Unnameable Books on Sunday, January 15th at 2pm for Red Bloom Reading Group's discussion of No Lamps, No Candles, No More Light: Patriarchy on the Left (part 1) by Eve Mitchell and Joselyn Cohn of Unity and Struggle. 

What is Patriarchy? In much of mainstream feminist discourse, it is largely assumed that the answer to this question is widely known. However, beyond particular manifestations of patriarchy and the dictionary definition of the term, in depth explanations of what patriarchy is and why it exists are largely absent from mainstream discourse. Having discovered this lack of a clear definition and conflicting understandings of patriarchy, Eve and Jocelyn in their first installment of their series Patriarchy on the Left engage different explanations of "what is patriarchy" with a historical materialist account of its reproduction today.

Find the reading here: http://unityandstruggle.org/2015/10/27/patriarchyontheleftpart1/

Resist! Film Series: Born in Flames 1/11, 6:30pm

Join us for our second installment of the Resist! Film Series, a monthly showcase of films and documentaries that focus on radical resistance, historical and contemporary activist movements, and intersectionality.

Born in Flames is a 1983 documentary-style feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States socialist democracy.

Check out the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn2rgP24pEc