Events
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Start: 5:00 pm
Drawn from seven years of research and presenting statements ranging well back into the 17th-century, Northwestern University journalism professor Robert Elder's Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago) is exactly what its title says it is. Organized by method of execution and time period, it makes no overt statements for or against capital punishment. "This is a dangerous book. Who knows how we will emerge from the encounter? It makes me want to live, use my energies in soul-sized pursuits like justice, like love. One of the psalms says that God collects our tears in a flask—so too does this collection of last words from human beings before they were killed." - Sister Helen Prejean.
Start: 7:00 pm
Two terrific younger writers based in New York, both published by Graywolf Press, read here this evening through some fortuitous coincidences in travel plans. Jessica Kane follows a debut book of stories, Bending Heaven, with an evocative first novel set in London during World War II, The Report. "An absorbing, thought-provoking first novel about a terrible civilian tragedy during wartime, The Report manages the delicate literary feat of being both a probing historical inquiry into a disaster, and a moving, multi-faceted portrait of a community under extreme duress ... the book's moral complexities linger long after the book is finished. A memorable debut." – John Burnham Schwartz. Originally from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Tiphanie Yanique draws from island life for her engaging debut book of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. "In this Widest of Sargasso Seas Tiphanie Yanique gives us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers' colony on Chacachacare, off the coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It's an astonishing debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if Jean Rhys had written it today." – Robert Antoni. "Let us hail this new literary voice, vibrant, humorous, original and powerful. These stories introduce us to a new world free of the old images and too familiar clichés of the Caribbean." – Maryse Condé. This reading is presented as part of National Book Group Week.
Start: 7:00 pm
Co-presented with JEWISH IN SEATTLE and the University of Washington Chapter of HILLEL. Young Dr. Jacob Sammelsohn arrives in Vienna in the 1890s, befriends Sigmund Freud, and falls for one of his beautiful and wealthy patients in Joseph Skibell's epic historical novel, A Curable Romantic (Algonquin). "Intellectual comedy of the Highest Order." - J.M. Coetzee. "Skibell's delicious juxtaposition of Sammelsohn against the cocaine-snorting Freud, and Sammelsohn's infatuation with the 'cruel, vindictive, haughty, caustic, dismissive, even murderous' character of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's patients, make for a magnetic collection of personalities." - Publishers Weekly. Joseph Skibell's novels include A Blessing on the Moon, which received the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Turner Prize for First Fiction. He teaches at Emory, and is director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. Free, no tickets needed. Richard Hugo House is at 1634 Eleventh Avenue (just north of Pine, a block-and-a-half from Elliott Bay). The café/bar will be open.
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