Story Telling Series - September/October in San Francisco


As part of the exhibition Vocabularies of Metaphor: More Stories, Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco is pleased to host a series of evenings of writers reading their short
stories.

September 10: Yiyun Li’s 2005 collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,
won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway
Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her
stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story
magazine, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She
is a winner of the Pushcart Prize and the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review,
and she holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of
Iowa. Born in Beijing, she lives in Oakland and teaches in the MFA program at
Mills College. Her novel The Vagrants will be published in February. She will read
“A Man Like Him” from a new collection in progress.

September 24: Daniel Alarcón is associate editor of the award-winning monthly
Etiqueta Negra, published in his native Lima, Peru, and author of the 2005 story
collection War by Candlelight. His first novel, Lost City Radio, was named a 2007
Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and
Washington Post, among others. He’ll be reading a new story called “The Idiot
President.”

October 8: Jodi Angel's first collection of short stories, The History of Vegas, was
selected as a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Her short story
“Portions” received a Special Mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. She teaches
fiction writing and short story literature at UC Davis. The story she will be
reading is “Field Dressing,” from her new collection in progress.

October 15: Eric Puchner wrote the 2005 story collection Music Through the
Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His
short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, the Chicago Tribune, The
Sun, and Best New American Voices. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace
Stegner Fellowship, and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts grant, he is
finishing a novel to be released by Scribner. He lives in San Francisco with his
wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their daughter. He will be reading “Children of
God.”

October 29: Barry Gifford has received awards from PEN, the National
Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of
America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. David Lynch’s film Wild at
Heart, which was based on Gifford’s novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1990, and his novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature
film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia in 1997. With Lynch, he co-wrote the
film Lost Highway (1997); he also co-wrote City of Ghosts (2003) with director
Matt Dillon, as well as the libretto for Ichiro Nodaira’s opera Madrugada (2005).
His books include The Phantom Father, a New York Times Notable Book of the
Year; Wyoming, which has been adapted for the stage and film and named a
Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year; The Sinaloa Story; The Rooster Trapped in
the Reptile Room; Do the Blind Dream?; the story collection The Stars Above
Veracruz; and The Cavalry Charges (essays). His work has appeared in Punch,
Esquire, Rolling Stone, Sport, the New York Times, El Pais, El Universal, La
Republica, Brick, Projections, La Nouvelle Revue Française and many other
publications. He’ll be reading something from his most recent book, Memories
from a Sinking Ship.

The “Story Telling” program was curated by longtime arts and literary editor for
San Francisco magazine, Pamela Feinsilber, who is now working on assorted arts
ventures, among them consulting on literary and nonfiction manuscripts and
proposals, leading a monthly book group and author discussion at Book
Passage, and freelance writing and editing. Her essay “The Long and Short of
Lit,” championing the short story, appeared in the July issue of San Francisco
magazine and led to an hour-long discussion on Michael Krasny’s KQED-FM radio
program Forum.