We started in the Big Apple and traveled to Nairobi, Kenya and Chicago. Drop by the Salon nearest you and meet other writers.

Upcoming Salons

NYC | March 21, 2010

We’re celebrating the arrival of spring and a special reading with writers from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at the next Sunday Salon. Join us at Jimmys 43 at 7pm!

Writers from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference bring a long-held conference tradition, Readings From The Dark Tower, to NYC. Five writers of color who reflect the complex diversity of America read from their work and answer questions about what it means to be “the first” (in a family, a country, an ethnic group), to achieve literary success.

Ru Freeman’s creative and political writing has appeared internationally. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl is published in the US and Canada by Atria/Simon & Schuster by Viking in the UK, Australia and India, in translation in Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and the Netherlands and in audio by Tantor Media with award-winning narrator, Anne Flosnick.

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore to Irish and Indian parents, and grew up in Wyoming, where she still lives. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has received writerships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2005-2009. She has been nominated for Best New American Voices 2009 and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio. She is currently finishing a collection of short stories, Cowboys and East Indians.

Emily Raboteau is an assistant professor in the English Department at the City College of New York. She has an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she was a New York Times Fellow. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, …

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So many good books to read these days. Where to start? Check out our latest reviews, books by alumni and tempting recommendations.

{REVIEWED} Ask the Dust

By René Georg Vasicek
Ask the Dust is a dangerous book. Arturo Bandini, the narrator, is a terrorist of the mind. He explodes reality and makes you believe in the urgency of now: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

I didn’t think literature was possible in Los Angeles, and then I read Ask the Dust (1939) by John Fante. At the time I thought I was finished with American novels, too busy devouring the Europeans: Knut Hamsun, Robert Musil, Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald. Then one day I was killing time …

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