9L Presents Wordharvest | Saturday | 4 p.m. | Cowboy Monkey | Free
The University of Illinois’ award winning literary magazine, Ninth Letter, has scheduled a pretty epic reading for this Saturday at the Cowboy Monkey. Each reader in her or his own right has been on a roll:
- Jensen Beach‘s first book For Out of the Heart Proceed has some much deserved recieved critical acclaim. We are incredibly lucky to have a guy like this living in our midst — luckier still to have him reading this Saturday.
- In between writing for Salon and The Wall Street Journal and editing PANK and editing/writing essays for The Rumpus and teaching and doing about a thousand other things, Roxane Gay (only one ‘n’ here, people) also manages to produce some of the more compelling fiction out there these days.
- Local product Ted Sanders has a new book out through Graywolf which, quite recently, got some love from none other than The New Yorker. Ted is also in my fantasy football league where he struggles to attain the same degree of success he has in his literary career.
- Ninth Letter always publishes killer work, but from everything I’ve heard, Springfield writer Amy Sayre‘s story in the soon to be released issue is a killer.
- Earlier this year, Knox College professor Chad Simpson won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi. I’m pretty darn sure I was one of the first civilians to read this (I pre-ordered), and am also pretty darn sure all of my friends are sick of hearing me talk about it. Absolutely fucking devastating. You could buy it only for “Peloma” (originally published in McSweeney’s) and be completely satisfied. Luckily, the rest of the book is pretty goddamn good too.
Seriously, this is a tremendous lineup — one definitely worthy of your time, especially if you need a break from all the loud Pygmalion rock music going on around town on Saturday.