UPCOMING EVENTS
All Events are held at Twenty Stories Bookstore, 107 Ives Street in Providence, RI
CATHERINE CHUNG
Friday December 6, 2019, 7pm
Catherine Chung is the author of The Tenth Muse (HarperCollins) and Forgotten Country, for which she won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MFA from Cornell University. In addition to being a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she was named a Granta New Voice and a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her writing has received support form The MacDowell Colony, Jentel, Hedgebrook, UCross, and Yaddo, among many other places. You can find more of her published work in The New York Times and Granta. She is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine and lives in New York City.
“Endlessly thrilling. An exquisite story of legacy, selfhood, survival, and integrity… The Tenth Muse is an inspiring tour de force of STEAM proportions: a riveting intersection of mathematics and art.”
— The Rumpus
“Chung uses the history and language of mathematics in The Tenth Muse to explore how the past is inextricably tied to the present. Her writing has a beautiful clarity, and the novel has an epic feel, sweeping between decades and continents without ever losing sight of the human lives at stake. This is a timely story about a woman searching for her identity in an inhospitable environment and emerging scarred but triumphant.”
– BookPage (starred review)
PAST EVENTS
JAMEL BRINKLEY
Friday September 13th, 2019, 7pm
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, A Public Space, and Tin House, among other places, and is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2019.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a 2018-20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
"[A] singular collection... Brinkley's portrait of New York and its edges are full of people who feel contained pushing at the boundaries of their lives... Through pages of peerless prose and startlingly sharp sentences, what ultimately emerges is a constantly reframed argument about the role and power of masculinity." - L.A. TIMES
"With this observant book, Brinkley demonstrates an enviable capacity for narrative compression. In the space of 25 pages, he’s capable of creating complex and memorable emotional worlds. This is a very hard thing to do, but in A Lucky Man, he pulls it off in one story after the next." - MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
SARAH ELAINE SMITH
Thursday August 15, 2019, 7pm
Sarah Elaine Smith is the author of Marilou is Everywhere (Riverhead) and the poetry collection, I Live in a Hut, 2011 winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize. Smith holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction and the Michener Center for Writers in poetry. Her work has appeared in FENCE, Tin House, jubilant and Gulf Coast, among other publications.
“Marilou is Everywhere is a novel of stunning emotional intelligence, and Cindy an unforgettable character, but it's Smith's writing that's the real star of the book. Her language is hypnotic and enchanting, with lines that read like poetry […] Nearly every page of the novel features a breathtaking turn of phrase; the book is almost otherworldly in its beauty and power.
Fiction debuts this accomplished don't come along very often at all, and Marilou Is Everywhere proves that Smith is a writer of immense talent and rare imagination. Her voice is nothing short of angelic, and this novel reads like a miracle.” —Michael Straub, NPR
CHIA-CHIA LIN
June 21, 2019, 7pm Chia-Chia Lin is the author of the celebrated novel The Unpassing (FSG). Lin graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Henfield Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, NewYorker.com, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and Zyzzyva. She currently lives in Northern California.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. "A singularly vast and captivating novel . . . What makes Lin’s novel such an important book is the extent to which it probes America’s mythmaking about itself." --Brian Haman, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] grim, breathtakingly beautiful debut novel . . . Lin excels when she gets small, with finely observed renderings of the family’s surroundings . . . The way this chilling, captivating book concludes will delight as much as it challenges, offering as it does a blend of escape, tragedy, triumph, loss and what we’ve expected all along." --Nathan Deuel, The Los Angeles Times