Wednesday, May 04 07pm
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
110-112 W 27th Street, Suite 600, New York, New York 10001
We’re treading the treacherous waters of the Age of Exploration and the history of New World slavery. Guiding your rudder will be two formally adventurous story collections: Dark Room Collective member John Keene’s Counternarratives (named Best of 2015 by Flavorwire, Lambda Literary, LitHub, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine) and Japanese American novelist Naomi Williams’s Landfalls (picked for the NBCC longlist and the One Story Debut Ball). Moderated by AAWW Executive Director Ken Chen.
John’s story collection Counternarratives (New Directions 2015) documents the history of race and transatlantic slavery wielding a metatextual witchcraft that tries to be as expansive as what it documents. The book spans several centuries, hundreds of characters, both real and imagined, and a range of styles, from slave narrative, field manual, newspaper accounts, epistolary narrative, maritime history, and concrete poetry. Keene writes about a settlements in Brazil, the death of a newborn in a Kentucky convent, and a curious remeeting between Huck and Jim.
Naomi Williams’s meticulous debut collection Landfalls (Macmillian 2015) reimagines the ill-fated Lapérouse expedition (1785-1788), an ill-fated French voyage that went from Chile to Alaska to California, Macao to Sydney–only to never be heard from again. Williams narrates each chapter of Landfalls from a different point of view, ranging from French captains to the scientists onboard to indigenous subjects encountering the Europeans. A captivating narrative of an 18th century French voyage for a 21st century readership, Landfalls blurs the line between real and imagined, pushing the boundaries of interpretation and art.
$5 suggested donation
Open to the public
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