Events
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Start: 1:00 pm
Special midday at Elliott Bay reading. Originally published as Locke 1928 by a small California press—a story somewhat akin to Karl Marlantes and Matterhorn—Shawna Yang Ryan's debut novel, Water Ghosts (new in paper, Penguin) is a brilliant tale of three young Chinese immigrant women who take on life and some larger than life force in the Sacramento delta eighty years ago. "A beautiful debut, Water Ghosts opens up a page in history that sometimes is forgotten by both cultures that once coexisted in Locke, a Sacramento Chinese farming town. By mapping out the familiar and the strange territories of human passion and retelling the old myths, Shawna yang Ryan tells a story that, in the end, is about how America was truly made." – Yiyun Li. "Artfully woven, exquisitely modulated, walking a master's line between ancient, Chinese myth and the grit of immigrant life in the Sacramento delta, Water Ghosts tells the unforgettable story of a town brought to its knees by loneliness and longing. Complicated, compassionate, haunting, Shawna Yang Ryan's novel feels more like tapestry than words on paper, her prose less like sentences and more like song." – Pam Houston.
Start: 7:00 pm
A marvelous, locally-based poet (and software ace) who is originally from Cairo, Maged Zaher gives this first full Elliott Bay reading as a kind of sendoff before a trip 'home' to see family and touch base. He is here with a recently published volume of poetry, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer (Pressed Wafer), a book written in English, but dedicated to the Arabic language. "Maged Zaher is in my view the contemporary writer simultaneously the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it. His texts are intensely casual and bathed in the language of Groupthink and Microsoft, yet deeply thought and rhythmically alluring, which is all the more impressive for the detrius they take on and challenge. Like his near contemporary, Linh Dinh, Zaher can fashion either sentence or line to the point where sublimity and absurdity make a viable erotic couple. If Frank O'Hara has been an Arab and a Coptic Christian living in late capitalist Seattle, he would have been called Maged Zaher." – Leonard Schwartz.
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