Adam Golaski: Color Plates & John Cotter: Under the Small Lights
Friday, September 24th at 7 pm
ADAM GOLASKI
author of
COLOR PLATES
and
JOHN COTTER
author of
UNDER THE SMALL LIGHTS
Join us as authors Adam Golaski and John Cotter will appear at the store for a reading and discussion of their new books.
Adam Golaski is the author of the new collection, Color Plates. Color Plates is a museum of stories, curated by a sort-of Mary Cassatt. Four rooms of Mary’s museum are open to the public, and they are named Éduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Color Plates contains sixty-three little stories—plates—spun from real paintings by these painters. The stories range from sweet to weird, from melancholy to funny. This isn’t just a short story collection, and it isn’t a novel, but something else entirely. The plates each stand alone, offering startling visions and situations. Yet at the same time, Color Plates offers the depth of a novel, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. The museum says: My name is Mary and Mary is my museum. Paintings are brushstroke upon brushstroke. With a pencil I lift each brushstroke and make lines. Line upon line, story upon story, the small fictions in Color Plates will engage you, delight you, and challenge you to consider the intersections between art and time.
“Color Plates is a breakthrough collection. I could not put this book down. Like all lovers of contemporary fiction, I hunt for that rare and intelligent voice that both inspires and delights—Golaski is that voice. A trickster more deft than Steven Millhauser, Golaski is a visionary wordsmith and Color Plates is a wonder box of stories. Not only will I buy this book for my friends and relatives, I will carry Color Plates around with me to spark my own imagination and writing—a one-of-a-kind book find, a mind-blowing reading experience. I love this book.”
- Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red
Adam Golaski is the author of Worse Than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008). He is a founder of Flim Forum, a press publishing books of contemporary experimental poetry, and is the editor of New Genre, a literary journal for new and experimental horror and science fiction. He blogs at www.adamgolaski.blogspot.com.
John Cotter's debut novel Under the Small Lights was published in 2010 by Miami University Press.
Jack wants Corinna, Star wants Jack, Paul wants fast money, Jack and Bill want immortality in art. On a freezing January day Jack and Bill construct elaborate theatricals on the shores of Walden Pond. In burning July, Jack attempts to insinuate himself into the life Corinna’s picked with another man, the moneyed town and overgrown garden she was born to, the wealthy poet next door, and the distant world of artistic success. Fireworks misfire. A summer party and a winter confrontation heat into harsh words, violence. Long-held secrets are revealed.
Under the Small Lights is a lyrical take on the lives of lost 20-somethings, lust, and the state of art. Jack, Bill, Star, and Corinna grow up without roadmaps, with dubious role models, and with more pills and gin than they know what to do with. They are actors in search of roles, and they are betrayed in these roles by real life. This is a novel about the doubtful possibility of collective love and the painful experiences which, once having endured them, we wouldn’t be without.
“Under the Small Lights is a kaleidoscopic glimpse at an intense circle of friends as they mix love and obsession in a sort of game of art. John Cotter knows how to write cutting dialogue and create slices of ardent and ambitious lives as they balance on the last edge of youth.”
- Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and Five Skies.
John Cotter is the founding editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly. He was born in Norwich, Connecticut and now lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. His short fiction has appeared in Hanging Loose, The Lifted Brow, New Genre, and Lost.
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