Rare Bird Lit and Melville House present the Brooklyn Launch Event for JILLIAN LAUREN’s new novel, PRETTY (Plume/Penguin | August 30, 2011) with very special guests MELISSA FEBOS (WHIP SMART) and NICK FLYNN (ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY; THE CAPTAIN ASKS FOR A SHOW OF HANDS).
Friday, September 23rd, 2011, 8pm
Melville House Bookstore
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
http://mhpbooks.com/aboutsub.php?id=43
Event books available for purchase on-site.
ABOUT PRETTY
An electrifying debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls.
Bebe Baker is an ex-everything: ex-stripper, ex-Christian, ex-drug addict, ex-pretty girl.
It’s been one year since the car accident that killed her boyfriend left her scarred and shaken. Flanked by an eccentric posse of friends, she is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway house, while trying to finish cosmetology school. Amid the rampant diagnoses, over-medication, compulsive eating, and acrylic nails of Los Angeles, Bebe looks for something to believe in before something—her past, the dangerously magnetic men in her life, her own bad choices—knocks her off course again.
ABOUT JILLIAN LAUREN
Author and performer Jillian Lauren grew up in suburban New Jersey and fled across the water to New York City. She attended New York University for three minutes before dropping out to work in downtown theater, where she performed with Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theater, among others.
Her New York Times bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS: My Life in a Harem, was published by Plume in April 2010. It has since been translated into fourteen different languages.
Her novel, PRETTY, will be released on August 30, 2011.
Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Flaunt Magazine, Opium Magazine, Society, Pale House: A Collective and in the anthology My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories.
She has read at spoken word events across the country and has been interviewed on such television programs as The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern. She was a featured dancer with the infamous Velvet Hammer Burlesque. As a performer, she has worked with directors as diverse as Robert Cucuzza, Steve Balderson, Lynne Breedlove, Austin Young, Michelle Carr and Margaret Cho.
Jillian recently premiered her solo performance piece, Mother Tongue, at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles.
She regularly blogs at TODAY Moms, The Nest and Jillianlauren.com.
She is married to musician Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their son.
MELISSA FEBOS is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, WHIP SMART (St. Martin’s Press), which Kirkus Reviews said, “Expertly captures grace within depravity.” She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and the cover of the NY Post, among many other national publications. Her writing has been published in venues such as Hunger Mountain, Dissent, The Southeast Review, Redivider, The Rambler, Storyscape Journal, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Bitch Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and on The Nervous Breakdown (thenervousbreakdown.com), where she regularly blogs. She co-curates and hosts the Mixer Reading and Music Series at Cake Shop, has taught at SUNY Purchase College, The New School, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently Assistant Professor at Utica College. Recently named one of “Five New Queer Voices to Watch Out For” by Lambda Literary, she is the winner of the Memoirs Ink contest, and a 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellow. She speaks widely, from classrooms and conference panels, and splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York. She is currently at work on a novel. More at melissafebos.com.
NICK FLYNN’s most recent book is The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, a collection of poems that are linked to his latest memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, which the Los Angeles Times calls a “disquieting masterpiece.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two other books of poetry, Some Ether, and Blind Huber, as well as a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. A film version of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is due out in 2012 from Focus Features, starring Robert De Niro, Paul Dano, and Julianne Moore. Each spring he teaches at the University of Houston—he then spends the rest of the year in (or near) Brooklyn.
DIRECTIONS
The store is on Plymouth, between Jay and Pearl Streets, in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.
By train: F to York; or A/C to High Street/Brooklyn Bridge.
From the York Street F station: Exit on to Jay, turn right and walk three blocks. Take a left on Plymouth and you’ll find the store at the end of the block.
From the High Street/Brooklyn Bridge A station: Exit to Adams Street. Follow Adams toward the River to Pearl Street and take a left on Pearl Street. Walk 5 blocks on Pearl and you’ll reach the bookshop.
