Monthly Archive for February, 2005

Joseph Suglia reads from Years of Rage
Saturday, May 14th, 8:00 PM
 
Joseph Suglia earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in 2002. He now teaches at several universities in Chicago. Besides H?lderlin and Blanchot on Self-Sacrifice, a book-length study of the theme of martyrdom in modern literature, his writing and literary criticism has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies, including diacritics, Germanic Notes and Reviews, German Life and Letters, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Focus on German Studies, Literature and the Law, and The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. Suglia also regularly contributes to the online magazine, YouthQuake.
 
YEARS OF RAGE was considered by many presses to be ?too intense? and ?too controversial? for publication. No one denied its literary merit, but many were afraid of the book because it forced readers to identify with the young killer who serves as its main character and narrator.
 
Inspired by the Columbine High Massacre, Years of Rage takes place inside of the head of a schoolboy who is bent on murdering his classmates. We, as readers, see what he sees. We think what he thinks. We feel what he feels. We enter a nightmarish world in which it is impossible to separate objective reality from the phantoms of the mind, a world where there are no limits, a world where desire gears toward destruction, a world where love merges with violence.
 
There is a great deal more going on in his new book Years of Rage than merely a response to school shootings. Suglia wanted to write a novel about a self that is ?universally rejected.? The horizons of high school, according to the logic of Years of Rage, are the horizons of the universe. ?Columbine? served as the perfect occasion for writing about this relationship between the self and the world.
 
Check out www.yearsofrage.com

Stefan Kiesbye reads & signs
Next Door Lived a Girl
Friday, January 28th, 8:00 PM
FREE
 
The winner of Low Fidelity Press’s first novella contest, Stefan Kiesbye was born on Northern Germany’s Baltic coast and grew up in West Berlin. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Stefan Kiesbye’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches writing at Eastern Michigan University and works as a freelance writer. Stefan Kiesbye will be reading and signing Next Door Lived a Girl at the event.
More info is at the Low Fidelity Press website: www.lofipress.com
 
Reviews:
“This is Stefan Kiesbye’s brilliant debut, a book so quiet and yet so maddeningly powerful, you just have to wonder about him a little bit. You will read from beginning to end and you will feel this world and its inhabitants neither responding nor reacting in ways you quite expect, but nevertheless, rising up beneath you in a most compelling and unsettling way, and when you are through you will scratch your head and tell someone they have to read it too.”
-Robert Olmstead, 2004 Novella Award judge
 
“Kiesbye’s dark, distinctive vision of humanity, is composed with such narrative skill and verve as to render the bleakness bracing, the grimness utterly gripping. A significant and powerful debut.”
-Peter Ho Davies
 
“Next Door Lived a Girl is both laconic and feverish, with German adolescent boys poking their sometimes violent way into the world. The violence here is somehow both surprising and inevitable. The novella has a fascinating combination of everyday domestic life and subsurface violence, and Stefan Kiesbye is to be praised for this quietly eloquent tale, this mixture of the horrifying and the everyday.” -Charles Baxter