Tag Archive for 'Adam Levin'

Quimby’s Podcast Episode #7 With Authors Adam Levin & Tim Kinsella

Quimby’s Podcast Episode #7 With Authors Adam Levin & Tim Kinsella is now available for your listening pleasure. Adam you might know from his books Hot Pink and The Instructions Tim you might know from his book The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense, or because he’s in bands like Joan of Arc and Cap’n Jazz (among others). Adam and Tim did an event here. Then we conned them into talking to us about their work and each other, while trapped in the mysterious Quimby’s basement. You can listen to the podcast in a variety of places like finding it on I-Tunes, or download it or even stream it, with links at the the Quimby’s podbean site here.

Adam Levin & Tim Kinsella Read 3/13

Mar ’12
13
7:00 pm

Adam Levin (The Instructions) Reads from Hot Pink with Tim Kinsella, author of The Karaoke Singers Guide to Self Defense

Adam Levin’s debut novel The Instructions was one of the most buzzed-about books of 2010, a sprawling universe of “death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth” (Rolling Stone). Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers ten smaller worlds, shaken snow-globes of overweight romantics, legless prodigies, quixotic dollmakers, Chicagoland thugs, dirty old men, protective fathers, balloon-laden dumptrucks, and walls that ooze gels. Told with lust and affection, karate and tenderness, slapstickery, ferocity, and heart, Hot Pink is already Flavorpill’s most anticipated books of 2012.

Adam Levin’s novel The Instructions won the NYLP’s Young Lion’s Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize.

In Tim Kinsella’s novel The Karaoke Singers Guide to Self Defense, a family reunites for a funeral, leery of one another, comparing splintered memories. Will bathes his grandmother. Mel gives her wig a haircut. Norman is not prepared to take over his father’s club. Jesse has never known how old he is. They each cope with limited options and murky desires. Long bus rides through a post-industrial Gothic Midwest, Classic Rock, and compulsive brawls hum a requiem for the late night life of Stone Claw Grove.

Tim Kinsella has fronted such bands as Cap’n Jazz, Owls, Friend/Enemy and Joan of Arc. His writing has appeared in The Chicago Reader, Monsters & Dust, and Stop Smiling.

For more info:

Click here for info about Adam.

Click here for info about Tim.

Christopher Boucher reads from How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive with Adam Levin (The Instructions) 8/24

Aug ’11
24
7:00 pm

By the time Christopher Boucher reaches Chicago he will have driven nearly 3,000 miles across America in his 1972 Volkswagen Beetle, reading from How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, playing the novel’s theme-song on his banjo, and reading to people, roadsigns, potholes, old barns, paramedics, flowers and railroad tracks. “I see this tour as a natural extension of the book,” he says. “The novel was written in a whimsical, playful style, but it was inspired by…my father, and the sense of wonder that he instilled in me.  That sense of wonder propelled every sentence in the book, and I want it to fuel the tour as well.”

In How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Christopher Boucher has created a zany literary universe, a place where metaphors shift beneath your feet, familiar words assume new meanings, objects talk, trees attack, and time actually is money. Modeled on the cult classic 1969 hippie handbook of the same name, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an astonishing tour-de-force that calls to mind the off-kilter comedy and inspired fabulism of Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Saunders. The prose summersaults, but the book also tackles some of life’s biggest questions: How do you cope with losing a parent? What’s the secret to raising a child? How do you keep love alive? How do you get your car to start?

“Writing to save your life—and your 1971 Volkswagen—is at the heart of this wildly imaginative debut… Readers are in for a fresh, memorable ride with this inventive ‘collage of loss'”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A new, exuberant novel-world. Goofiness and grief are in perfect harmony in this impressive, moving debut.”—Sam Lipsyte

Also joining the bill is Chicago author Adam Levin, author of The Instructions (McSweeney’s).

More info: mhpbooks.com vwalive.com theboucher.com mcsweeneys.net

Wed, August 24th, 7pm

Deb Olin Unferth Reads Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War With Adam Levin 3/7

Mar ’11
7
7:00 pm

Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.

Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics’ Choice. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature.

“This is a very funny, excoriating honest story of being young, semi-idealistic, stupid and in love. If you have ever been any of these things, you’ll devour it.”—Dave Eggers

Also joining the bill is Chicago author Adam Levin, author of the novel THE INSTRUCTIONS.  His collection of short stories, HOT PINK, will be published next Fall by McSweeney’s.  He lives in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute.

For more info: us.macmillan.com/revolution-1

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/aboutinstructions.html

Monday, March 7th, 7pm