Brian Joseph Davis of Joyland will be reading from Ronald Reagan, My Father and Dan Sinker of CellStories will present stories from cellphones.
By the time Brian Joseph Davis stops in Chicago to promote his new collection of short stories, Ronald Reagan, My Father (ECW), over half will have been given away via Chicagoan Dan Sinker’s CellStories project. The two met when Sinker was finding content partners and Joyland.ca, a short story web journal edited in 7 different North American cities and co-founded by Davis, was a perfect match, leading to Davis to experiment with distributing his own stories. Tonight they’ll read and talk about the ins and outs of free fiction.

Ronald Reagan, My Father

In Ronald Reagan, My Father the elderly take to the streets at night for illegal electric scooter racing. A copy editor suffers brain damage from a virus and is suddenly filled with cannibalistic violence and award-winning minimalist poetry. A Texas doctor transplants the mind of a meth-addicted convict into the body of a suburban web developer, resulting in America’s first “death-penalty case that turned into a custody case that turned into a right-to-die case.” Brian Joseph Davis is an artist and the author of Portable Altamont, a collection that garnered praise from Spin Magazine for its “elegant, wise-ass rush of truth, hiding riotous social commentary in slanderous jokes.” Slate called his first novel,
I, Tania, “The book of your fever dreams.”

Dan Sinker is the founder of Punk Planet magazine and is the creator of CellStories, which provides a new short story or essay everyday and has been recently praised in Publisher’s Weekly for its bold approach to networked reading.

For more info: http://www.joyland.ca , http://brianjosephdavis.com/ , http://www.cellstories.net