Archive for the 'Store Events' Category

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Porn & Pong with author Damon Brown

Published on September 9, 2008 0 Comments
Oct ’08
16
7:00 pm

McDonald’s has Fast Food Nation, the fish industry has Cod, but no book has successfully weaved the cautionary tales and humorous history of the world of video games into our modern society… until now. In Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture journalist Damon Brown spent five years exploring how the $20 billion video game industry traces our evolution in sexual mores, technological dependence and personal interaction.

The VCR and the dawn of the modern porn industry parallels the first Atari systems, Reality TV skyrocketed the same year as The Sims, and the surgically-endowed Pamela Anderson was only outshined by one other woman: Lara Croft. In one of the most stimulating moments, Brown examines Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2005 tirade against Grand Theft Auto, and how politics, hidden agendas and financial pressure affect all controversial art forms. “From TiVo to Google to Match.com, technology is now part of our everyday lives,” Brown says. “Technology is officially sexy now.”

Fans of pop culture, technology and modern sexual history will be addicted from page one. Author and regular CNN tech correspondent Scott Steinberg calls it “A stimulating look at two of today’s most controversial subjects,” while Playboy Senior Editor Scott Alexander says “…Brown shows the pivotal role erotic content has played in the evolution of this new medium, as well as the furor and controversy it inevitably stirs up.”

Author Damon Brown covers sex, music and technology, but he is first and foremost a pop culturist. A Northwestern grad, he regularly contributes to Playboy, SPIN, the New York Post, Inc., AARP The Magazine and Family Circle. Damon also writes the Inspector Gadget column for PlanetOut, the largest gay and lesbian website.

An in-demand tech commentator, Damon has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, G4 and BBC World, and has spoken at several conferences including the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association and Chicago Magazine Writers One-on-One. In 2006 he helped moderate the first annual sex in video games conference in San Francisco. Porn and Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture, is being released by critically-acclaimed indie publisher Feral House.

Porn & Pong Website

French Milk author Lucy Knisley

Published on September 9, 2008 0 Comments
Oct ’08
14
7:00 pm

Join Chicagoan Lucy Knisley to celebrate the release of  FRENCH MILK. She will present and discuss some of her comic work and also sign copies of her book.

With the sights and smells of Paris floating off the pages, FRENCH MILK is a witty graphic travelogue that documents six weeks that the 23 year old author and her mother spent living together in Paris. Through drawings, photographs and musings, Lucy takes readers on a journey that begins in Chicago and continues through Parisian sites both on and off the beaten path – from flea markets and comic shops to cemeteries, museums and cafes. A passionate foodie, Lucy’s story is infused with savory illustrations and descriptions of the authentic Parisian food she quickly grew to love… croissants, cornichons, chocolate mousse, and of course, that fabulous French Milk!

Lucy is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently attends the prestigious graduate program at The Center for Cartoon Studies and is the winner of The Center’s Diamond in the Rough Scholarship.

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Trevor Alixopulos and Laura Park Sign Comics at Quimby’s!

Published on September 9, 2008 0 Comments
Oct ’08
11
7:00 pm

Come celebrate the release of Trevor Alixopulos’ 2008 Ignatz Award nominated graphic novel, The Hot Breath of War by Sparkplug Comic Books, with some of Chicago’s finest emerging cartoonists.   Join Trevor’s friends and fellow 2008 Ignatz Awards nominees Laura Park and Jeremy Onsmith for a signing to celebrate the release the Hot Breath of War.

The Hot Breath of War explores love amidst conflict and the seduction of violence itself. Trevor lives and draws in Santa Rosa and is also the author of Mine Tonight (also by Sparkplug Comic Books). Old school Quimby’s heads might also remember Quagga?


Laura Park has done illustrations for The Reader, Asthmatic Kitty Records and many others. Her mini comic Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream is available now.

Jeremy Onsmith is crazy! We wish he did more minis!!!!

More info at:
www.alixopulos.com
www.flickr.com/photos/featherbed/

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Deb Olin Unferth Event for Vacation

Published on August 31, 2008 0 Comments
Sep ’08
27
7:00 pm

In Vacation:
A man follows his wife. The wife follows a stranger. The stranger leaves town and the man goes after him, determined to settle the score. But the man is not the only one looking for the stranger, and the stranger has troubles of his own. Amid all this, the earth quakes, a boy leaps out a window, and a dolphin swims free. Of course people have adventures of this kind—of course! of course!—but we’ve never heard of it before. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak.

Deb Olin Unferth  is a University of Kansas professor and Pushcart Prize winner. She has been published in Harper’s, NOON, 3rd Bed, McSweeney’s, Fence, and other places. Vacation is her first novel.

Deb Olin Unferth will read and signs copies of Vacation at the event.

“Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most daring and entertaining writers in America today. She is an artist who knows that every sentence is an opportunity to have it all — music, invention, narrative drive —  and hers most definitely do. This novel is tricky, odd, unnerving, hilarious, and ultimately quite scary, not to mention very, very moving. We may or may not deserve this Vacation, but we are lucky to have it.”
-SAM LIPSYTE

“Part mystery, part sonata, Unferth writes like a musician plays, weaving images and themes and melodies with these beautifully rhythmic, funny, heart-breaking sentences. The whole novel should be read aloud and relished.”
-AIMEE BENDER

“In visionary, original prose, Deb Olin Unferth’s wonderful, quirky Vacation briskly sends forth its characters on their expectant journeys of self-discovery. Sentence by sentence, Unferth surprises and makes profound sense of what it is to be alive and how easily a lifesuit may be shucked off: “You won’t even feel it.” Loud applause should follow this accomplished —entertaining, funny, sad, solemn—book.”
-CHRISTINE SCHUTT

Joe Meno and Arthur Nersesian

Published on August 24, 2008 0 Comments
Sep ’08
25
7:00 pm

Joe Meno with Arthur Nersesian at Quimby’s!

Join authors Joe Meno and Arthur Nersesian as the read signs copies of their newest books

Demons in the Spring is a collection of twenty short stories by Joe Meno with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds–including Charles Burns, Archer Prewitt, Ivan Brunetti, Jay Ryan, Paul Hornschemeier, Anders Nilsen, Geoff McFedtridge, Kelsey Brookes, Kim Hiorthoy, Caroline Hwang, Rachell Sumpter, KOZYNDAN, Evan Hecox, and Cody Hudson.

Oddly modern moments which occur in the most familiar of public places, from offices to airports to schools to zoos to emergency rooms: a young girl who refuses to go anywhere unless she’s dressed as a ghost; a bank robbery in Stockholm gone terribly wrong; a teacher who’s become enamored with the students in his school’s Model United Nations club; a couple affected by a strange malady–a miniature city which has begun to develop in the young woman’s chest, these inventive stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and unusual. While many of them have never been previously published, others have been featured in the likes of LIT, Other Voices, Swink, TriQuarterly, and McSweeney’s.

Joe Meno is the best-selling author of the novels Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender As Hellfire. He was the winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago

Arthur Nersesian will also be on hand to read from his newest book The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Swing Voter of Staten Island–the first two installments in Nersesian’s series of novels offering an alternate history of New York: The Five Books of Moses.

Robert Moses was responsible for creating contemporary New York’s infrastructure, but he did so at the cost of destroying neighborhoods. In this novel, Robert has looted his brother Paul’s share of the Moses family fortune, repeatedly blocked his attempts at gaining public office, thwarted his career in the private sector, and set in motion events that will decimate Paul’s home life. Paul Moses’s deep-seated rage metamorphoses into an act of terrorism committed against his brother and against a city that he once cherished.

Although it can be read as a stand-alone novel about Robert and Paul Moses, The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx is also a memory play that follows Uli Sarkisian–the hero of The Swing Voter of Staten Island–en route to solving a massive historical crime, while desperately struggling to escape from becoming another one of its victims.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including the smash hit The Fuck-Up (more than 100,00 copies sold), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic), Suicide Casanova (Akashic), dogrun (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster), and Unlubricated (HarperCollins), and, most recently, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, the first volume in The Five Books of Moses series. He lives in New York City.

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