Cultural Clippings: Sunday Best Reading Series 2/5/12

Sunday Best Reading Series
Performances by fiction writers, poets, dramatists, memoir writers and spoken-word composers

Delicious New Fiction

Sunday, February 5th at 4:00 p.m.

Jonathan Baumbach

“In all of Jonathan Baumbach's fiction, there is a wonderful balance of ease and authority, subtlety and surprise, wisdom and playfulness…one of my favorite writers." —Robert Coover

Janice Eidus

“Nobody writes about Jewish cultural life quite as funnily and piercingly as Janice Eidus"  —Mindy Lewis, editor, Dirt: The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House

Douglas Light

“Gems of stories, slyly, skillfully interrelated and captivating in their economy, truth, and acid wisdom” —Frederic Tuten, author of Tintin in the New World

Suggested donation of $7 includes free drinks and snacks

Reception after to meet the writers

The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens -
Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street

Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including Dreams of Molly; YOU; On The Way To My Father’s Funeral: New and Selected Stories; B, a novel; D-Tours; Separate Hours; Chez Charlotte and Emily; The Life and Times of Major Fiction; Reruns; Babble and A Man to Conjure With. His stories have appeared in Esquire, American Review, Tri Quarterly, Partisan Review, Zoetrope, Antaeus, Iowa Review, Open City and Boulevard magazines. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Byrnes Book of Great Pool Stories, All Our Secrets Are the Same, O.Henry Prize Stories, Full Court: a Literary Anthology of Basketball, The Best of TriQuarterly, and On The Couch: Great American Stories about Therapy. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. In 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) he invented the Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America, reinvented in 1988 as FC2. He is the author of The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction, has been the Film Critic for Partisan Review and is the two time Chairman of the National Society of Film Critics.

Novelist, short story writer, and essayist Janice Eidus has twice won the O. Henry Prize for her short stories, as well as a Pushcart Prize, a Redbook Prize, and numerous other awards. Her 2008 novel, The War of the Rosens, won an Independent Publishers Award in Religion and was nominated for the Sophie Brody Medal, an award for the most distinguished contribution to Jewish Literature for Adults. Janice's other books include the short story collections The Celibacy Club and Vito Loves Geraldine and the novels Urban Bliss and Faithful Rebecca. Her work appears in such magazines as Tikkun and Jewish Currents and such anthologies as Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction; On Longing and Belonging; The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories; Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex; and Scribblers on the Roof: Contemporary Jewish Fiction. She's the Fiction Editor at Shaking, the print and online journal, and has been a guest speaker and teacher throughout the U.S., Europe, and Central America.

Douglas Light's new story collection, Girls in Trouble, won the 2010 AWP Grace Paley Prize. His first novel, East Fifth Bliss, won the 'Popular Fiction' section of the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association and was made into a film starring Michael C. Hall, Peter Fonda, and Lucy Liu. Light co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Knowles. Light's second novel, Where Night Stops, received a 2010 NoMAA Grant. His fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and has appeared in the 2003 Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology and in Narrative, Guernica, Alaska Quarterly Review, Failbetter, and other magazines. He was a finalist for the 2002 James Jones First Novel Fellowship and for the 2010 Indiana Emerging Author Award.

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http://sundaybestreadingseries.wordpress.com/

Sunday Best Curator, Patrizia Eakins, 212-923-7800, x1342

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Coming Soon to The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens:

January 29 at 5:00 pm:  The prize-winning Grneta Ensemble, featuring clarinetists Vasko Dukovski and Ismail Lumanovski and pianist Alexandra Joan, will play works from the romantic era, original arrangements of instrumental music from the Balkans and new works.  $12 suggested donation includes post-concert reception with the artists.