[Dec 11] Feral Voices XIV: The Other Brooklyn Series

Join us Wednesday, December 11th at 7 pm for a Feral Voices reading! 
 
Feral Voices is a monthly reading series that focuses on celebrating a selection of writers who work and struggle outside of the typical institutions of the writing community.

A night for those who work one or more "day jobs," but have a voice to share that goes against the grain or upends capitalist, patriarchal understandings of the label "author."

If your writing is proactively weird, if you are part of a marginalized group, and/or if you struggle with the financial insecurity that stems from pursuing writing outside university funding or published manuscripts then submit your work to feralvoicesreadingseries@gmail.com. They accept short stories, poetry, essays, plays, scripts, novel excerpts, and anything genre-bending and mind-altering.

And consider submitting your work for this event! Feral Voices is looking for 1-3 more readers.
 
Come to share, read, listen and build something new!

[Dec 6] Joanna Howard & Patty Yumi Cottrell

Join us Friday, December 6th at 7 pm to celebrate Joanna Howard's recently published novel Rerun Era in conversation w/ Patty Yumi Cottrell.


Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television.

(Find out more about Rerun Era here: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/rerun-era?taxon_id=1)


Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. She is the author of the novel Foreign Correspondent, the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round, and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She teaches in the literature PhD program at Denver University.


Patty Cottrell was born in Korea and raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and others. She lives in Brooklyn. Sorry To Disrupt the Peace, her first novel, was long-listed for the Times Literary Supplement’s Republic of Consciousness Prize, and is the winner of the Best First Book – Fiction 2017 National Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction.


(More about Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace?taxon_id=4)

December Readings at Unnameable

Wednesday December 4th Karthika Nair with Bibi Deitz
Thursday December 5th Anna Vitale // Lewis Freedman // Zack Piepe
Friday December 6th Joanna Howard and Patty Yumi Cottrell
Saturday December 7th Launch Party for the Marquis deSade's Aline & Valcour
Tuesday December 10th Greg Gerke and John Haskell
Wednesday December 11th Feral Voices reading series
Thursday December 12th Greetings says farewell until the Spring with Bob Rosenthal // Maggie Dubris // Patricia Spear Jones // OAE (music) // Ani Blech (performance)
Friday December 13th Eve and Sparrow Present...

[Dec 4] Karthika Naïr "Until the Lions" with Bibi Deitz

Karthika Naïr Until the Lions with Bibi Deitz
Wednesday December 4th 7-9 pm

"Most books’ epigraphs don’t slap me in the face, but then Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Archipelago Books) is not most books, and Naïr is not most writers. Her epigraph quotes Chinua Achebe: “There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter…Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian.” Naïr, in nearly three hundred pages of connected poems, reimagines the story of the Mahabharata as the lions’ story, giving a voice to nineteen of its characters and allowing them each to tell their own account." --Bibi Deitz from her interview with Karthika Naïr in Bomb


"I was keen on exploring the human cost of war beyond victory and defeat, on imagining and chronicling the testimonies of those for whom victory becomes a word without meaning. The families left shattered, distraught siblings and wives, a populace shorn of land and home, those reduced to slavery or serfdom or the reign of another ruler, who’d merely perpetuate an expedient social 'order.' And to examine too, through these accounts, how we can all too easily become complicit in conflict and injustice." — Karthika Naïr

Come hear Karthika discuss Until the Lions, her radical retelling of the Mahabharata. She will be in conversation with Bibi Deitz. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

In "Until the Lions," Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered and destroyed throughout history. She captures the richness and complexity of the Mahabharata, while illuminating lives buried beneath the edifices of one of the world’s most venerated books. Through shifting poetic forms, ranging from pantoums to Petrarchan sonnets, Naïr choreographs the cadences of stray voices. And with a passionate empathy, she tells of nameless soldiers, their despairing spouses and lovers, a canny empress, an all-powerful god, and a gender-shifting outcast warrior. "Until the Lions" is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.
 
Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the poetry collection "Bearings" and the children’s fable "The Honey Hunter," illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She was the principal scriptwriter of choreographer Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning solo, DESH (2011), and of its 2015 adaptation for family audiences, "Chotto Desh." Khan's adaptation of one chapter of "Until the Lions" won the 2016 Tanz Award for Outstanding Production. Another adaptation of the book, this time for opera, will premiere in March 2020 at the Opéra national du Rhin in France.

Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals, including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. She was a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow, and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015. Her latest book is the collaborative "Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris," a travelogue in verse, written with Mumbai-based poet Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam.


Bibi Deitz lives and writes in Brooklyn, and grew up in the East Village. Her work has appeared in Storyscape, Paper Darts, Bomb, Bookforum, Vice, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center, and has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, where she was a Barry Hannah Scholar. She recently finished her first novel, Stand Clear the Closing Doors, and she’s at work on her next book.