Babylon Salon

Babylon Salon

presents our Fall Reading

Saturday, September 8, 2018, 6.00 pm 
at The Armory Club
1799 Mission Street 
(downstairs performance space)  

featuring
—

Daniel Mallory Ortberg
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s first book, the satirical bestseller Texts from Jane Eyre: and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters, was described by the Los Angeles Times Review of Books as a “splendid and wry work of humor writing” and by Elizabeth Gilbert as “candy coated in crack cocaine… it’s the best.” Ortberg’s newest book, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, has been on countless Best Books and Most Anticipated lists for 2018, and has won praise from Kelly Link, Charlie Jane Anders, and Carmen Maria Machado who notes, “the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart.” The co-founder of The Toast, he has written for Gawker, New York Magazine, The Hairpin, and The Atlantic. Since 2015, Ortberg has been Slate’s Dear Prudence columnist and writes The Shatner Chatner newsletter.

Tommy Orange 

The 2018 debut novel by Tommy Orange, THERE THERE, was described by Janet Maslin in The New York Times this way: “Groundbreaking. Extraordinary. Tommy Orange has written a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum.” Margaret Atwood has called the book “an astonishing literary debut” and Marlon James writes, “THERE THERE drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of 21st century literature finally announcing itself.  Essential.” Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.

Lisa Locascio

Open Me, Lisa Locascio’s 2018 debut novel, was recently cited by Pulitzer-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen as “unflinching in its portrayal of sex, desire, racism, and the excitement and confusion of youth. Infused with erotics and politics, this is a novel that will haunt you.” Aimee Bender calls the novel “a kind of love letter to the female body and all its power and visceral complexity… A remarkable, fearless debut.” Locascio’s work has appeared in The Believer, Tin House, n+1, Bookforum,and many other magazines. She is the co-publisher of Joyland and editor of 7x7LA and of the anthology Golden State 2017. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University and the incoming Executive Director of the Mendocino Writers’ Conference.

Katharine Dion 
Katharine Dion’s 2018 debut novel The Dependents has already been named one of the best books of the summer by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, and Brit + Co. The writer Kate Walbert notes that “The Dependents that grapples with important questions through generations–the way we live now, the way we may have chosen to live then–and the consequences. Dion’s intelligence and ambition truly shine through sentence after sentence.” Dion is a graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has also been a MacDowell Fellow, the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below contest. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Ismail Muhammad

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, California. He’s a staff writer at the Millions, a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA, a board member at the National Books Critics Circle, and a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at U.C. Berkeley. In addition, he’s been a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellowship, a Simpson Family Literary Fellow, and a participant in the VONA 2017 workshops. His work, which focuses on literature, art, identity, and black popular and visual culture, has appeared in publications like Slate, New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life, and Catapult. He’s currently working on a novel about the Great Migration and queer archives of black history. Talk to him for any amount of time and you’ll probably end up learning more than you ever wanted to know about Los Angeles and/or Drake.

____________________

Free Admission

Cash Bar Exotica

Doors at 5.30,

Reading at 6.00

@ the Armory Club,

1799 Mission St., San Francisco
across from the San Francisco Armory