Thursday, April 1, 2010

The 510 Readings @ CityLit Festival

The 510 Readings will be at the CityLit Festival this month, as is our tradition, though at a different time 1:30 in the Fine Arts Department in the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It will be a great one, four writers with new books--Sam Lipsyte (The Ask), Dawn Raffel (Further Adventures in the Restless Universe), Geoff Becker (Hot Springs), and Andy Devine (Words).

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in the Quarterly, Harper's, NOON, Open City, N+1,.Fence, Tin House and Playboy, among other places. His newest book is The Ask (FSG). He teaches at Columbia University in New York City.

Dawn Raffel's new short story collection is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc Books). She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body, and a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She has been a magazine editor for many years and has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University.

Andy Devine’s alphabetical fiction and essays have appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, elimae, Everyday Genius, and Taint. In 2002, Devine was awarded the Riddley Walker Prize (for a work that ignores conventional rules of grammar and punctuation). In 2007, he published his first chapbook, “As Day Same That the the Was Year” (Publishing Genius). In 2009, Devine was awarded The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Award (for fiction in the face of adversity). WORDS (2010, Publishing Genius) is his first book. Andy Devine Avenue — in Flagstaff, Arizona — is named after him.

Geoffrey Becker’s new novel, Hot Springs (Tin House Books, 2010) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it “a remarkably taut narrative and a rousing testament to humanity’s capacity for resilience.” He is also the author of Black Elvis (U. of Georgia Press, 2009), a collection which won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, and two previous books of fiction, Bluestown and Dangerous Men. Geoff’s awards and honors include an NEA Fellowship, the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, the Nelson Algren Award, inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology, and two Maryland Arts Council Prizes. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University.

3 comments:

drev said...

The street in Flagstaff,Az was named for Andy Devine,the actor of Western movie fame, not the author. The actor was born in Flagstaff.

pajeco said...

Thanks for that. This was really bothering me.

Rick58 said...

Andy Devine Blvd. is in Kingman, AZ, and of course is named after the actor who died in 1977. He was born in Flagstaff but they moved to Kingman when he was 1.

This author "Andy Devine" is not the same man at all ...