Realism

Next Monday, if you're so inclined, come by The Kitchen at 7pm to talk realism: On Monday, March 3, The Kitchen will present Reading and Talking Realism: An Evening with Open City and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

The two-part evening will combine the fun of a typical reading with a rare opportunity for readers and writers to talk about the strength of the realist mode, its dominance in fiction and its influence on other genres, in the past, present and future. The first segment will feature writers Keith Gessen, Jenny Davidson, Frederic Tuten and Eileen Myles reading portions of their own work.

In the second segment, the writers will participate in a panel discussion about the tradition of realism in literature and how their work both derives from and criticizes it. The panel will be led by Patrick Gallagher, a contributing editor to Open City and former managing editor of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of the literary magazine n+1. He has written on contemporary Russian and American literature for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. Gessen’s first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, is forthcoming from Viking Press in April 2008.

Jenny Davidson is the author of the novels Heredity, from Soft Skull Press and The Explosionist, forthcoming from HarperCollins Children’s Books in July 2008. Davidson is also an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Frederic Tuten is the author of the novels The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Tallien, Tintin in the New World, Van Gogh's Bad Café and The Green Hour, in addition to many stories and essays. Tuten is also a Professor in the graduate fiction-writing program at City College of New York. In 1973, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and in 2001 he was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Eileen Myles is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Irony of the Leash, Sappho's Boat, On My Way, and, in 2007 Sorry, Tree from Wave Books. She is also the author of the short story collection Chelsea Girls and the novel Cool For You. Myles’s newest project is The Importance of Being Iceland, her first full collection of art criticism.

Reading and Talking Realism will take place at 7:00 P.M. at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Tickets are $5.