Archive for the 'Store Events' Category

Dive Friday withJonathan Stockton and Kirby GannFriday, June 17th, 7:00 PMFREE
 
Ig Publishing presents Dive Friday, featuring Jonathan Stockton, reading from his seminal study of Chicago’s seedy underworld, Chicago’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Windy City, and Kirby Gann, reading from his newly released novel, Our Napoleon in Rags, most of which is set in a dive bar.
 
Our Napoleon in Rags centers around Haycraft Keebler, bipolar son of a famous politician, who thinks he canchange the world. And he will do anything, legal or otherwise, to inspire the people of Montreux, a decaying city in the heartland of America, to rise up against the powers that be and restore the city to its former glory. Haycraft’s home away from home is the Don Quixote, a dive bar in the heart of the heart of the city, and the regulars, long used to Haycraft’s schemes, keep watch over their bipolar “Napoleon in Rags.” However, the bonds that hold this “family” together are forever changed when Haycraft falls in love with a fifteen-year old male hustler. Weaving the contemporary hot button issues of mental illness, homophobia, racism and police brutality through a novel that is Victorian in its graceful storytelling,
 
Chicago?s Best Dive Bars features opinionated reviews of over 90 of the grungiest and grittiest drinking establishments in the Windy City. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those ?other? bar guides and find out where the ?real? people do their drinking, then Chicago?s Best Dive Bars, is the drinking person?s guide to the delightfully filthy underside of Chicago bar life.
 
Kirby Gann’s short fiction has appeared in Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review. He is also Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the MFA Program at Spalding University. And, he went to college in Chicago.
 
Jonathan Stockton is freelance writer, proofreader and Leap Year Baby. He lives, works and recovers the next day in Chicago.
 

Sam Brumbaugh reads from
GOODBYE, GOODNESS
Wednesday, April 27th, 7PM
FREE
 
Hayward Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his, and trying to understand how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a sinister producer, and his best friend?s strange escape from rehab all figure into the story. To further complicate matters, Hayward is the great-grandson of a massively ambitious robber baron named Finn Theiss, who had a long-ago affair with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hayward begins to untangle the convoluted estrangement between these two, and confronts the possibility that Annie Oakley is in fact his great-grandmother. The novel includes beautifully interwoven excerpts from Oakley?s autobiography that have never appeared in book form. Goodbye, Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful and bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly sad book about the American dream coming to the end of the line.
 
Brumbaugh writes with the exquisite, nonchalant precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends. Readers will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice?and this new take on coming of age while fervently reckoning with the past.
 
Sam Brumbaugh has worked in the music industry for two decades, touring with bands such as Pavement, Cat Power, and Mogwai, producing music specials for PBS, and, most recently, a documentary on the great Texas musician Townes Van Zandt. His fiction has been published in Open City magazine and The Southwest Review. A relative of Annie Oakley himself, he lives in New York City.
 
For the event Sam Brumbaugh will read and sign copies of his book.