Archive for the 'Store Events' Category

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Ben Tanzer and Steve Lafler

Published on March 7, 2007 0 Comments
Mar ’07
7
12:00 am

Ben Tanzer and Steve LaflerWednesday, March 7th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
Join us as Ben Tanzer, Chicago writer, reads from debut novel Lucky Man. Cartoonist Steve Lafler reads & performs interpretive dance from the graphic novel 40 Hour Man.
 
Ben Tanzer\’s debut novel Lucky Man follows four friends from their final days of high school though their first couple of years out of college. Each has personal demons they are battling – anger, substance abuse, sexual identity, and detachment – and the novel is separated into four sections, with each section focusing predominantly on one of the friends and his individual struggles.
 
It is a story about friendship, growing-up and trying to move on. Interwoven throughout are explorations into dreams, the Twilight Zone, the Grateful Dead, and The Greatest American Hero. There are drugs, road trips, breakdowns, violence, and adultery. Fathers and sons try to make sense of their relationships and characters question what it means to know God. It is a quintessentially American tale, and at the end only one character remains on his feet. Whether this means he is lucky, or not, will need to be decided by the reader.
 
Ben Tanzer lives in Chicago where he shoots pool, dabbles in social work, compulsively watches High School Musical, and spends all sorts of quality time with his lovely wife and young sons. He has had work published in a variety of magazines and journals including Rated Rookie, Clamor, Punk Planet, Abroad View, Opium, THE2NDHAND, Thieves Jargon, The Truth Magazine, Chicago Parent, Third Coast Press, 20dissidents, and Caketrain.
 
Is it a career, or a series of really lame jobs? Stephen Beaupre (author) and Steve Lafler (cartoonist) pose this timeless question in Forty Hour Man, a hilarious saga of one working stiff\’s three-decade journey into the minimum wage heart of the American Dream. It\’s all here – from scrubbing a steakhouse floor with a toothbrush to going bust in the Internet boom. Every bad boss. Every crazy co-worker. All the more shocking because it\’s true!
 
Steve Lafler is the cartoonist behind BugHouse, Baja and Scalawag, a trio of graphic novels about bugs on drugs playing be-bop jazz, and the seminal indie comic book series Dog Boy, featuring a lad with a canine head on a zen-trickster rampage through Reagan-era America.
 
Both will sign books (both on Manx Media).
 

The 2ndHand Release Event

Published on March 3, 2007 0 Comments
Mar ’07
3
12:00 am

The 2ndHand Release Event with
Jeb Gleason Allured, Patrick Sommerville and
Nic PizzolattoSaturday, March 3rd, 8:00 PMFREE
 
The reading is an issue release event for the latest 2ndHand broadsheet, coinciding with an identical event in Atlanta. Featuring readings from:
 
Jeb Gleason-Allured is the Chicago editor of The2ndHand.com.
 
Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lived in one or two large American cities, and earned his MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. He has taught creative writing at both Cornell and Auburn SCF. His first book of short stories, Trouble, came out in September of 2006 (Vintage). He lives in Chicago and is 428 years old.
 
Nic Pizzolatto is the author of the story collection Between Here and the Yellow Sea. Said Booklist: ?Pizzolatto, like the great Richard Ford, is drawn increasingly to sad, even grim scenarios depicting the way people fail to connect. And, also like Ford, he expresses their dissatisfaction in precise language, drawing readers into perfectly realized, frequently unconventional scenarios?These sad, beautifully rendered stories will resonate with fans of the form.?

Oyez Review Issue 34

Published on February 24, 2007 0 Comments
Feb ’07
24
12:00 am

Oyez Review Issue 34 EventSaturday Feb 24th 8PMWith Jotham Burrello and J.
Weintraub, plus two other contributors to the new issue.

John Sheppard and Evan Mandery

Published on February 21, 2007 0 Comments
Feb ’07
21
12:00 am

John Sheppard and Evan ManderyWednesday, February 21st, 7:00 PM
 
SMALL TOWN PUNK by John SheppardTrapped in dreary Sarasota, Florida in the early 1980s–during Reagan’s “Morning in America,”–going to high school with junior fascists by day, working at Pizza Hut by night, his family a dysfunctional nightmare, 17-year old Buzz Pepper feels that nothing matters in life beyond drinking, drugs and punk rock.
 
As the country around him is becoming more conservative and corporate, and adulthood seems like the ultimate corrupt existence, Buzz can only find solace within a close-knit group of fellow disillusioned teens, which includes his devoted younger sister, Sissy. As they drive around in Buzz’s beat-up van, encountering redneck cops, mocking the local “geezers,” and wondering if there is any meaning in what seems to be a meaningless world, Small Town Punk perfectly captures how it is to be young, yet feel that you have no future.
 
John Sheppard currently lives in Chicago, and his fiction has been published in Bridge Magazine.
 
DREAMING OF GWEN STEFANI by Evan Mandery.Mortimer Taylor Coleridge is a unique man. With a mind of rare mathematical precision, he is obsessed with imposing order upon the chaos of every day life. A once brilliant student of evolutionary biology at Columbia University, he has turned his back on a promising academic career to devote his life to selling hot dogs at Papaya Queen. And Mortimer has used his keen intellect to become the quickest and most efficient of hot dog men, devising a numerical-based system to sell hot dogs which maximizes both time and effort.
 
One day while watching TV, Mortimer comes upon VH1, and his life is instantly transformed. While watching Behind the Music: No Doubt, he decides that he and Gwen Stefani are soul mates, destined to be together. When Mortimer discovers that her favorite food is a Papaya Queen hot dog, he dedicates his life to preparing for the day, which he knows will come, when Gwen Stefani will walk into the Papaya Queen where he works, order a frankfurter and fall in love with him.
 
Evan Mandery is the author of two works of nonfiction. Dreaming of Gwen Stefani is his first novel. He lives in New York City.
 
Both Authors will be present to read and sign their new books.

M. Dylan Raskin reads from Bandanas and October Supplies

Published on February 16, 2007 0 Comments
Feb ’07
16
12:00 am

M. Dylan Raskin reads fromBandanas and October SuppliesFriday, February 16th, 7:00 PMFREE
 
In Bandanas and October Supplies, M. Dylan Raskin (MDR to friends) is back with the most unexpected of books?an offbeat love song to his ailing mother?that reads like a punk-rock version of The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Of course, there\’s a twist.
 
As always, young Mr. Raskin has a lot on his mind. His generation is still stocked to the gills with morons and \”walking clich?s,\” and MDR?s favorite things?blanket forts, fleece pants, cozy trees, and the month of October, to name just a few?are still in woefully short supply. But when his mother is diagnosed with cancer, MDR?s usual troubles are forced to the backseat. Together, mother and son hit the road in their little Honda del Sol and scour America for peace and quiet and the \”October supplies\” they need to keep going.
 
Equal parts road story, elegy, and hallucinatory bildungsroman, Bandanas and October Supplies is a bittersweet love story that is like no other book ever written about death, life, and the complex devotion between a mother and a son.
 
M. Dylan Raskin will read and sign his new book at this event