Friday, March 4, 2022 7:30pm
About this Event
Are you excited?!? Friday, March 4th at 7:30, at Skylight Books, Anna Journey will be reading from her new collections of poems, The Judas Ear, and Joe Boone will be reading from his novel, Furnace Creek, in an exclusive English double book launch!
Anna Journey's The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.
Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear (2022), The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (2017), and Vulgar Remedies (2013), all from LSU Press, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She’s also published the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin (Counterpoint, 2017). Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Journey has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues--racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle--that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris--all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, FURNACE CREEK leaps the frame of Dickens masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family. Stretching from the American South to the Ivy League and the dream of Rome and Paris, FURNACE CREEK is a sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man's education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.--Viet NguyenJoseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut - Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen, Joe Boone's FURNACE CREEK is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody's story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you're Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and FURNACE CREEK is a genuine accomplishment.--Michael Cunningham Fiction. California Interest.
Joseph Allen Boone is the author of three works of non-fiction, a musical adaptation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and a forthcoming short story collection from BSPG, Conditions of Precarity. Reviewers heralded his most recent book, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, as a once-in-a-decade masterpiece. Furnace Creek, a finalist in four international competitions, is Boone’s debut novel. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim, ACLS, National Humanities Center, Bellagio, and Bogliasco, the author is an endowed professor in English at the University of Southern California. He resides in Los Angeles.
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