George Saunders Celebrates 10 years of CityLit Fest

The annual CityLit Festival, a favorite spring event in Baltimore, is celebrating 10 years this Saturday. From its very inception, ringmaster Gregg Wilhelm has brought in top names to headline the festival: the likes of Edward P. Jones and Junot Diaz.

This year, the fiction headliner is George Saunders, author the bestselling Pastoralia, set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and In Persuasion Nation, one of three finalists for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year. The New York Times Magazine called Saunders's latest collection, Tenth of December, "the best book you'll read this year."

Headlining poets are poets laureate Stanley Plumly of Maryland and Dick Allen of Connecticut read their latest work. Plumly is the author of Orphan Hours and is recipient of the 2010 John William Corrington Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature). Allen is the author of Present Vanishing and recipient of the 2013 New Criterion Poetry Prize, one of the country's most prominent prizes for a book-length collection of poems that pays close attention to form.

Other featured authors include Jen Michalski, Elisabeth Dahl, Nathan Leslie, Tim Wendle, Nik Korpon, and CL Bledsoe. I’ll be on hand as well in the Literary Marketplace.

Join us on April 13, 2013, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in downtown Baltimore, and discover (again) why Baltimore magazine called CityLit Festival "a can't miss event on the city's social scene."

www.citylitproject.org/index.cfm?page=news&newsid=130

Nervous Breakdown — Inspired … Refreshing … Natural Storyteller

The Nervous Breakdown recently published Nik Korpon’s review of Tracks: A Novel in Stories. Here are some key excerpts from the stellar review …


…another nice touch by Goodman [is] this constant reevaluation of characters after being observed in later stories. In the same way trains cars rock and sway, our perception of earlier characters—the old and rigid Prewitt, the immature Malcolm and Tina, the woman (Demi) whose tattoo snares the lascivious attention of most men on the train—sways with each successive story. Who we thought the characters were from observation isn’t exactly who they are once we’re inside their head.


Goodman’s prose feels inspired by this same romance of trains that tinges the book. He is a natural storyteller, one who takes time in unfurling these lives, showing us things we wouldn’t see from the highway of grocery-store fiction. In an age of high-speed internet, Facebook lives and thoughts that only last 140 characters, it’s refreshing to see a book with such unhurried attention to character. In the same way that train rides make time seem liquid, maybe non-existent, the narrative-time of Tracks bends and contorts to encompass large swatches of the characters’ lives. In Live Cargo, Helen, an older women returning from a visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, slips between her childhood experience of trains—a stockade car full of people on the way to a Nazi death camp—and her time in the museum. She tries to swipe away visions from her childhood, “charred piles of bodies, blackened flesh clinging to faces like the burnt skin of overcooked marshmallows.” Reset features Gene Silverman, the reinvented persona of Eugene Beckett, an identity-theft wiz-kid who now speaks as an activist for the legalization of recreational drugs, prostitution and gambling. The story shifts between his rise through the criminal ranks and his quick flight from the life. Goodman’s steady hand lets the reader move between these potentially jarring shifts with ease, swaying through time like a car on the rails.

Like a train-ride itself, it’s not the arrival at the other station that’s the important part. It’s all of the things you see, people like the characters in Tracks who you meet along the way. They stay in your head, long after the final page is turned.

Read the entire review at The Nervous Breakdown:

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/nkorpon/2011/12/review-of-tracks-by-eric-d-goodman/

Sun Also Rises on Lit & Art’s 2012 Season

The sun has risen on the new year. This weekend, the sun also rises on the 2012 Lit & Art Reading Series. The next Lit & Art takes place on Sunday, January 29 from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Watermark Gallery.

Featured readers include Toby Devens, Charles Rammelkamp, and Nik Korpon. Returning readers include Lauren Beth Eisenberg and Meg Adams.

The original works of resident artist Manzar will be on display and available for purchase. Books by the authors will be available. Complimentary wine and refreshments will be served, and audience members will have a chance to share their own work during the open mic session.

The event takes place from 2 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, January 29 at The Watermark Gallery, located in the Bank of America Center Skywalk Level, right across from the Inner Harbor, at 100 S. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland. The phone number is (410) 547-0452.

Started in October 2007, the Lit and Art series provides a unique opportunity to sample a wide variety of artistic sensibilities in one sitting. Hosted by authors Eric D. Goodman and Nitin Jagdish and the Watermark Gallery’s resident artist, Manzar, the events are free and open to the public.

Come experience “the best excuse to get lit in Baltimore on a Sunday afternoon.”

http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/181120815252390/

Saturday Night Reader

Its Episode Two of Season Four: of the 510 Reading Series — the event that takes place at 5 p.m. on the third Saturday of every month — for the rest of your life.

This weekend’s headliners include Jessica Anya Blau (The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Drinking Closer to Home), Nik Korpon (Stay God), Pat King (Exit Nothing), and Tara Laskowski (2009 Kathy Fish Fellow and writer-in-residence at SmokeLong Quarterly).

So much good writing (and reading) happening all in one place at one time, Saturday, February 19th, at 5pm, at Minas (815 W. 36th Street, Hampden).

http://510readings.blogspot.com/