The KGB Bar Reader - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688164080 ISBN 13: 9780688164089

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1998

Synopsis

The KGB Bar Reading Series, originally conceived as a small literary series in a funky bar in New York City's East Village, has grown into a showcase for daring, lively writing that draws a response from listeners -- and readers -- and is quickly earning national recognition. Finally, fiction and nonfiction selections from the series are gathered together in this unique anthology.

This edgy, energetic collection represents more than twenty of today's best young writers. Kathryn Harrison, Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Elizabeth Gilbert, Luc Sante, and others appear here with up-and-coming new voices. While some of these pieces have been published in magazines such as The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's, and Story, many were read first at KGB, and others are in print here for the first time.

This writing is often unpredictable, taking readers by surprise with the same anything-might-happen feel of the bar itself. (After all, the tenement that houses KGB once served as U.S. headquarters to the Ukrainian Communist Party.) This wholly original collection will appeal to readers eager to discover new favorites.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Foster has organized the KGB Bar Reading Series since its inception in 1994. He received an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where he was fiction editor ofColumbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. He lives in New York City and is at work on a novel.

Reviews

reading series itself all belly up to the literary bar in this anthology. The KGB Bar, on Manhattan's East 4th Street, decorated in post-Soviet kitsch to honor the bars past life as home for the Ukrainian Communist Party's US headquarters, has established itself as one of New Yorks literary epicenters, including a highly successful public reading series. Editor Foster, after answering a flyer tacked up on a bulletin board at Columbia University, where he received his MFA, organized the series in 1994. In his selections theres no sign of old fashions in writing, either New Journalism or K-Mart fiction, or in fact any overarching common aesthetic. The essays, though few in number, stand out in sharp relief from the fiction: Lucy Grealy reflects on the intimacy of her tango lessons in ``Dancing a Sad Thought''; Elizabeth Gilbert reports on women who chase rodeo cowboys in ``Buckle Bunnies''; Meghan Daum mourns for a friend who hardly bothered to live; and Joanna Greenfield remembers being attacked by a hyena while working with wildlife in Kenya (which makes just about anything of Hemingway's look wimpy). The fiction assembled tends toward the lyrically shocking and features capable offerings from series favorite A. M. Homes, as well as Jennifer Egan, Rick Moody, Kathryn Harrison, Lydia Davis, Luc Sante, and other established writers. One stand-out is Junot Daz, whose ``Ysrael'' is matter-of-factly disturbing in its reckoning with childhood persecution. Of his own selections, Foster complains, ``Many people were eliminated [from the book] by their publishers' inability to allow their work to be republished'' (e.g., Elizabeth Wurtzel, who read from Prozac Nation at the inaugural reading). A round from one of New York's newest literary lions' dens. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"It's brutally quick, the way this happens, this falling in love with a writer's style. Part of the thrill...is realizing that there are other oddballs walking around out there, who look every bit as normal as you do, and that some of them know how to write. The best of these stories are too distinctive to suggest any trends, I'm happy to say...They send you in search of other work by these writers."

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688164080
• ISBN 13: 9780688164089
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 321
• Editor: Foster Ken